by Tabish Khair
The man thrusts his face close to Amir’s, and Amir has to make an effort not to turn away from the sweet stench. Then Ustad spits into a corner and murmurs: ‘Jis sar ko gharur aaj hai yaan taajwari ka...’
Amir cannot help completing the sher for him: ‘Kal us pe yehin shor hai phir noha gari ka.’
‘Ah’, says the old man, grimacing, ‘no nawabzada I am sure, what would a nawabzada do here, but educated, cultured. Even that is rare in these godforsaken parts.’
Then, turning to Fetcher, Ustad curses him again: ‘Shaitaan ki aulad! Spawn of Satan, son of a dozen fathers, I will do it just once. I will make the papers for your man — but it will be expensive.’
‘He can afford it, Ustad; he is amir, that’s ’is name, guv’nor: rich.’
Ustad laughs. ‘Cultured and rich? Now that is even rarer. What is the world coming to!’
He moves away to turn up two lamps and Amir sees that he is in a bare room, with cold, stone walls, bleak and austere. But the walls are covered with the most intricate calligraphy, lines from the Quran and verses from Persian and Urdu poets mixed together, couplets and stanzas and entire poems flapping around and around the walls, dipping like birds, blossoming like flowers, ebbing like the sea.
The mad old man’s eyes gleam with an unearthly light as he observes Amir Ali. ‘They cannot stop me’, he says, lighting a third lamp. ‘They have tried. They have done everything they could to stop me. But I have cheated them. Here, I still do what I was born to do, what I am capable of. They would have me do this and that. They would stop me. They would have me do other things, the servants of Shaitaan who infest these lands and are always taking over the world. And when that doesn’t work, they tempt me with money. They send to me people like you, to distract me from my work. But I cheat them. Always I cheat them. I take their money when I need to, and I cheat them. Always I go back to my real work. Look around you, you pimps and devils, look around and despair of victory. Even here I am what I was: the greatest calligrapher east of Samarkand. Behold, devious stranger, behold my master work and despair!’
He holds the lamp closer to the walls and roof, and Amir is startled to see that even the ceiling is covered with reams and reams from the Quran and from the work of poets such as Mir Taqi Mir and Wali Mohammed Wali: the beautiful cursive script in silver and white and gold, spreading its wings on the stone and plaster, fluttering like a bird caught in a net, filling the room with silent noise. Elaborate fragments from lost cultures that have coalesced to create this aviary of shrieking, silent alphabets, shored against the ruin of a mind, and somehow still preventing Ustad’s glittering eyes and bony hands from being exposed in full madness on the streets above, mouthing obscenities, casting stones.
73
Jaanam,
Sometimes you ask about my night in prison. Perhaps it reminds you of the fate of your mother, the mother you do not recollect but who you know was imprisoned and deported. And I hesitate to tell you the story. You assume that it is because I do not want to recall an unpleasant experience.
But that is not really true. There is another reason I do not wish to talk of those hours.
Let me tell you. I can explain this better in my language than in yours. Perhaps one day you will read these pages — and why not, for you grasp things very quickly when you apply yourself to the task — and you will have the real answer.
You see, jaanam, in those hours of imprisonment, a frightening thought crossed my mind. I felt that I had become my own story; my life had turned into the lie I had narrated to Captain Meadows. Suddenly, I was the thug I had claimed to be.
It felt strange to become something else. Is that all it requires? A few words, a few stories? Is our hold on reality so weak, so insecure? Can stories — told by yourself, told by others — turn us into something else? Why is it that, no matter how we grasp reality, no matter what reality we grasp, we need to don the glove of stories? Is that all we are: stories, words, breath?
Perhaps it was the suddenness of the events, the circumstances I found myself in, the taunting voices from the other cells, but thoughts crossed my mind like the delirious images one sees when tossing in a high fever. I almost came to believe that by deceiving Captain Meadows and his circle, I had become the master of deceit that he wished me to be; a thug. It frightened me: I feared that by hatching a thug in words, I had brought to life a real thug, one who was now stalking London and beheading victims. For a moment, I was no longer sure if the story I had told the Captain was not, after all, the true one, and the stories I told you and myself, simply lies.
Now that I have been released, and especially when I can hold you and feel the evidence of your reality as something not defined solely by words, I find my fears diminishing. But when I look back on my hours in prison, I find myself staring into a mirror, and from the mirror stares back someone who is me and not me. I find myself unable to say who I really am, if I am not also the thug brought into being by stories of my own making. Are we then nothing but the playthings of language? When do we tell stories, and when do stories tell us?
Oh, my love, I wish you were back now, so I could touch you and dispense with words.
74
Lord Batterstone finished labelling the latest skull that John May had procured for him. He placed it gently back in its place on the shelf. The room was full now. He had all the varieties he could have hoped to find on this fair isle, almost all. His theatre was complete.
Or was it? Why then this sense of disappointment, of dissatisfaction? Why the feeling that there was something lacking?
Would the voyage to Africa that he had started to envision fill this lack? Would it make him feel that his theatre was finally ready to be revealed to the public?
There was only one way to find out.
He had often thought of it, but now he would have to do more than think about it. He would have to start organizing the expedition. Yes, that was what he had to do. That, he was convinced, was his mission in life: a glorious voyage of discovery into one of the few remaining blank spaces on the map.
75
Qui Hy had wanted Amir to be nearby, within easy walking distance of her dhaba, but she had also wanted him to change his place of residence. She did not trust Major Grayper or Captain Meadows.
The basement she found for him was in a building that had been abandoned and was now used by beggars and other homeless people who paid, in kind, cash or service, a ‘rent’ to Bubba Bookman. A large man, dressed in a bowler hat and an eclectic assortment of loose clothes and robes that somehow gave him a regal bearing, Bubba Bookman claimed to be the direct descendant of a witchdoctor called Bookman who had led the great slave revolution in Haiti half a century ago. He also claimed, with greater evidence to back it, to be the Badshah of Beggars in Central and East London, a self-assumed title he had once defended with blows against two contenders simultaneously, who had since quit his kingdom for other parts of London. After that, potential usurpers left Bookman alone, and his reputation as an ex-prize-fighter in his youth remained untarnished despite his greying hair and increasing girth.
Bookman had made out a full royal description for himself. All those who swore allegiance to him (which they had to do in order to ‘rent’ a place in any of the dozen or so abandoned buildings in the Mint and London rookeries that he owned) had to address him, on their first meeting, with the full title: Badshah of Beggars, Tiger of Tinkers, King of the Cursed, Helper of the Homeless, Rajah of the Rejected, Duke of the Damned, Pope of Paupers, His Royal Highness, Lord Bubba Bookman the Brave.
That was how Amir addressed him now, in the company of Qui Hy. Amir had been allowed basement space in the building because of Qui Hy, to whom Bookman (like so many other people) owed a favour or two from the mysterious past, but he still had to present himself at the court of the Badshah of Beggars. Bookman sat regally on a broken wall outside the building, his many-coloured robes and dresses billowing in the gust. He had hung an umbrella from a section of the broken wall a
nd spread a large neat handkerchief on the broken masonry and now he sat delicately on the handkerchief.
Bookman held tightly, like a missionary might hold the Bible, a thick bound book which, Amir had already been told, was a collection of plays by Shakespeare. Bookman, though barely literate (unlike his namesake, the revolutionary ancestor who, Bookman insisted, was a learned man), had a way with words and a love for Shakespeare. He either remembered entire pages from Shakespeare or was lucky in his flipping of pages, for he was reputed to find the exact page he wanted every time he opened the tome. And he opened the tome regularly, either to prove a point or to consult it for auguries. He often recited the lines by heart, always at the right page; and sometimes he got others to read them out for him.
Bookman listened to Amir’s story without batting an eyelid: he was reputed to have a disconcerting ability to stand or sit unmoving, looking at you without giving any evidence of hearing you out. Amir had been encouraged by Qui Hy to tell Bookman of his troubles, explain why the police had been after him, and protest his innocence. If Bookman believed him, he would stand by him, and Bookman had more places in which to hide people than the Metropolitan police had men to look for them.
After Amir had recounted his story, though only from the point when he arrived in England (for Bookman was not interested in anyone’s story from before their arrival in London), he made the usual, formal appeal for Bookman’s patronage.
‘For a lascar, you speak English well, young man’, said Bookman in a booming voice.
‘He can even read English, Bookman’, Qui Hy quipped.
‘Read! A lascar who can read English! This I must see for myself, sister.’
Bookman opened his tome randomly, and thrust it at Amir, pointing to a section with a thick finger. ‘Read, my man, read what it says here on this page. Let Shakespeare decide your fate, East Indian.’
Amir read, with some difficulty:
‘O, reason not the need: our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous:
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life is cheap as beast’s...’
Bookman held up a regal hand. ‘You read well, East Indian’, he said. ‘And the bard is pleased. The bard has spoken. All glory to the bard. Welcome to my kingdom, son. But remember, you yourself are the surety for your rent, for this is also what the bard wrote:
A pound of man’s flesh, taken from a man,
Is not so estimable, profitable neither,
As flesh of muttons, beefs, or goats.’
With this softly sinister threat, Bookman jumped off the pile of broken masonry, surprisingly light on his feet, and neatly folded and pocketed the handkerchief on which he had been sitting. He walked away, jauntily swinging his umbrella, whistling a tune from the dancehalls. Two men who had been lurking nearby fell in with him as he walked into the street. The Badshah of Beggars had his courtiers.
76
John May is scolding his wife. The leg of mutton is slightly burnt. Waste of good money, he grumbles. You do not seem to care, woman, for the fact that I slog day and night, earning money for the victuals that you so casually burn.
His wife apologizes, blaming it on the butcher and the girl they have recently hired, and scuttles away to bring in the pudding. Their dinners have improved in quantity and quality over the past few months. The pudding, she hopes, will distract John May from her previous culinary failure, for it has turned out perfect and golden.
From experience, she knows that her dishes, well-cooked or not, are not the reason for her husband’s irritation. It is something else, something at work — whatever that might be. She never dares to ask John May about the nature of his work. He is not given to sharing matters with her, and lately he has fallen into even greater, and sullen, secrecy. He has put a padlock on the door of what he calls his ‘study’: that foul-smelling room in which he shuts himself for hours at a stretch on some days.
She does not really care. He is bringing in so much money that for the first time she feels they have money to see them through old age. That is her only concern: old age. She does not want to end up in a poorhouse and a pauper’s grave like both her parents had. If that means living with someone who comes home and slaps her because something has gone wrong at work, well, she has taken slaps from people who had harder palms and gave her much less in return.
When she walks in with the pudding, John May is lost in his thoughts and muttering to himself. She thinks he is saying something to their children or to her. But he is talking to himself, as he sometimes does, without even being aware of it. Damn Shields, he is saying, damn Shields. I just hope the fools do not make a mess of it.
77
None of the houses Jenny worked in was as impressive as Captain Meadows’ house. They were usually two- or three-room places, and never had more than one full-time maid. They had rooms full of old and broken furniture, which tended to disappear for periods, and sometimes for ever, when they were pawned for the purchase of more urgently required commodities. They contained children who were undernourished and either too mature or too childish for their age. Jenny did not like working in such households, though she did not have the education or the contacts to be hired as a maid in households like that of Captain Meadows. But even these dirty houses, where a knock on the door sometimes sent the husband and father scuttling into a cupboard to avoid the bailiff, even such houses were politer places to work in than the marketplace.
Or so Jenny felt.
The place where she is employed today — it is her last chore of the evening — is no different. There is an ailing wife who seldom leaves her couch, except to scold one of the children or Jenny, and there is a husband, a much older man not averse to touching parts of Jenny’s body whenever he can. Jenny hurries through her chores; she had hoped to go to Amir’s place in the evening, but it is already too late. It is dark, and her room is closer to this neighbourhood.
She wishes Amir could come to meet her at the end of her chores. But, of course, that is out of the question. Servants are commanded not to encourage ‘followers’, let alone a follower from another land.
Jenny bends down and... I cannot see what she does. From my grandfather’s library in Phansa, in the ghostly white pages of the books here and elsewhere, there is much that I can see and much that I cannot. Yet, I know she must be doing something similar to what I have seen the servants do in my grandfather’s house. Working. Bending. Cleaning. Sweating. And at the same time thinking about something else, someone else, somewhere else.
I know she is thinking of Amir. She is thinking of what he is: the reformed thug he is said to be, or the lover she knows him to be. Could the two be the same? Are they mutually exclusive? And how many names does he actually have? I see her bent figure, musing, while outside the shadows of the night gather, the noise of the street peters out, lamps flicker in the rising wind and one or two go out, doors begin to close, shutters are pulled down.
78
The evening has loosened the shadows from where they lay, pinned down by the buildings and posts, bridges and walls. Now they spread like ink: darkness oozes from under the ground and crawls up the houses and chimneys, the bridges and towers until it finally creeps into the sky, where the last flicker of the sun goes out like a candle starved of wax.
The houses here are grimy with soot: some still have clothes strung out of garret windows, drying in the air, now that the sunlight has vanished. These are houses struggling to survive, each containing more families than they would have in a better neighbourhood, each containing more hopes and aspirations than will be met by fate.
In this scene of shadows, stand Shields and One-eyed Jack. They make an odd couple. In size and deportment, they differ to a degree that would have made them noticeable anywhere. Perhaps that is why they are keeping to a dark corner of the emptying street. Or perhaps it is for some other purpose.
‘She works here. She will be out any moment. I know it: I have watched
her for many evenings now’, Shields whispers to One-eyed Jack.
‘Just give me ten minutes with ’er, Shields. You stay back. I’ll do it fer yer.’
‘But no hanky-panky, Jack. I will not have her molested. Your word on it, man. Swear to it. Swear.’
Jack swears, laughing inwardly at the strange morality of this nervous man.
79
Jaanam,
It is late. I am alone now, in this basement, on my cot. There is no Gunga, none of his boys, in this place. I seldom go out during the day. Qui Hy is afraid I will be arrested or attacked, though I do not look as I used to. I remember how you laughed when you first saw me like this. I even feel different.
With the papers that I have, the short hair, the clean-shaven face, will even Kaptaan Meadows recognize me again? Will the stories about the past that I told him still return to haunt my present, fashion my future?
I had hoped you would come tonight, and I could lose myself in the cascade of your hair. But I know that there are evenings when you cannot get away early enough to come to me. Each such night is a dark emptiness to me, and I cross that emptiness only in the hope that there will be other nights...
This is where the Farsi notebook that I found in my grandfather’s library peters out and my narrative is plunged into darkness. It is a darkness as sudden as the black of the powercuts which, with the years, have become epidemic in Phansa. Houses would be humming with activity — children playing, students reading, women cooking, men talking or working — when suddenly the lights would go off, the fans would clatter to a stop. Load shedding, someone would announce unnecessarily. The many threads of our activities would unspool and fall inert on the floor. The stories we were living out would be dunked in darkness. But, of course, the stories never stopped. There were sounds and smells and movement; sight is not all. And then someone would light a candle, or the moon would show from behind the clouds, sending a sliver of silvery light through the curtains. The darkness was never absolute.
