Soon, his living quarters no longer smelled of tigers and cheetahs and reflected a noticeable order and taste in their decor. His face, too, now assumed a slightly fresher look. However, all this happened so slowly that it was difficult to determine the exact time of the onset of the change.
Time rolled on. His new film was released. I observed a marked freshness in his acting. When I congratulated him, he smiled and said, ‘Come, have some whisky?’
‘Whisky?’ I asked, surprised. Didn’t he always drink rum . . . only rum?
His earlier smile shrank somewhat on his lips as he answered, ‘I’m tired of drinking rum.’
No further questioning was necessary.
A week later when I went to see him, he was drinking as usual, not rum but whisky, not in his shorts but in a kurta–pyjama. We played cards and drank for a long time. After a while I noticed his tongue and palate were having difficulty accepting the taste of the new drink, for with every sip he made a face as if he was drinking something foreign. I said to him, ‘Looks as if you haven’t got used to whisky yet, have you?’
‘Oh, I will. Give it some time,’ he said smiling.
Ram Saroop’s flat was on the second floor. As I was passing by one day I saw great big piles of empty bottles and cans near the garage being loaded on to a couple of rickety carts by a few junk dealers. I was aghast; this treasure could only have belonged to Ram Saroop. I felt a tinge of indescribable pain to see it being hauled away. I ran up to his flat and rang the bell. The door opened, but when I tried to step inside his servant uncharacteristically stopped me, saying, ‘Sahib was out on a shoot last night; he’s sleeping now.’
I left in surprise and anger, muttering something under my breath.
That very evening Ram Saroop came to my house with Sheela in tow, draped in a new crisp Banarasi sari. ‘Meet my wife,’ Ram Saroop said, pointing at Sheela.
Had I not already downed four pegs of whisky I would certainly have been knocked out.
Both of them sat for a short while and then left. For a long time afterwards I kept ruminating: What did Sheela remind me of? A papery, beige sari over a sparse, thin body, puffed out here, shrunk there? Suddenly the image of an empty bottle floated before my eyes, an empty bottle wrapped in paper.
Sheela was a woman—totally empty, but it was possible that one void had filled another.
A Progressive
When Joginder Singh’s short stories became popular it occurred to him that he could throw a party for famous prose writers and poets. He thought this would probably widen the scope of his popularity and acceptance.
Joginder Singh was nothing if not astute. After inviting the renowned litterateurs to his home and offering them great hospitality, he finally sat down with his wife Amrit Kaur and allowed himself to forget, at least for a moment, that he was just a clerk at the local post office where his real job was sorting mail. After he had relieved his head of the burden of carrying a three-metre-long, Patiala-style, coloured turban and put it aside, he invariably felt that the smallish head hiding under his long, jet-black hair was utterly filled with progressive literature. This feeling filled both his heart and mind with a strange elan. He believed the entire tribe of the world’s short story writers and novelists was connected to him in a subtle relationship.
What Amrit Kaur had a hard time understanding, though, was why, every time her husband invited these people, he never failed to say to her, ‘Amrit, these people who are coming for tea today, well, they’re India’s top-notch poets. Do you understand? Now don’t you go cutting corners in showing them proper hospitality, okay?’
Sometimes it was India’s top-notch poet, sometimes its greatest short story writer. Anyone less than that just didn’t cut it. Then there was all that raucous conversation that went on at the party, every word of it went over her head. Progressivism was talked about with great gusto and Amrit Kaur was unable to understand any of it.
One time, after Joginder Singh finished entertaining a very great short story writer and came to sit in the kitchen area, Amrit Kaur asked, ‘This blasted progressivism—what is it?’
With his turban still mounted, Joginder Singh shook his head slightly and said, ‘You can’t understand what it means just like that. A “Progressive” is someone who promotes “progress”. It’s a Persian word. In English such a person is called a “radical”. Afsana-nigars—meaning short story writers—who seek “progress” in story writing are called taraqqi-pasand.* In all of India today there are only three or four progressive short story writers and I’m counted among them.’
Joginder Singh liked to express himself using English words and phrases and it had become second nature over time. So now, without the least bit of hesitation he thought in an English that was made up of the choicest and most pithy phrases taken from the writings of some famous English novelists. In about fifty per cent of ordinary conversation he used words and phrases culled from English books. He always called Aflatun, Plato and Arastu, Aristotle. He threw Freud, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche into every one of his important conversations for good measure, though in ordinary speech he never mentioned these philosophers, and when talking to his wife he took special care not to allow English words or these philosophers to come anywhere near.
Amrit Kaur was terribly disappointed when Joginder Singh finally explained the meaning of progressivism to her. She was under the impression that this subject so hotly debated by her husband with distinguished poets and fiction writers would be something truly great. But after she realized that all of India boasted only a smattering of progressive short story writers, a soft glint appeared in her eyes. When Joginder Singh saw it, his bushy-moustached lips quivered a bit in a faint smile. ‘Amrit,’ he said, ‘you’ll be pleased to know that a great man of India wants to see me. He’s read my stories and likes them very much.’
‘Is this great man a poet or a story writer like you?’ Amrit Kaur asked.
Joginder Singh promptly took out an envelope from his pocket. Patting the back of his hand with it he said, ‘He’s both. But he’s most famous for something entirely different.’
‘And what might that be?’
‘Well, he’s a wanderer.’
‘A wanderer?’
‘Yes, a wanderer . . . he’s made drifting the sole aim of his life. He’s always on the go. Now in the chilly valleys of Kashmir, now on the sun-swept plains of Multan. Sometimes in Sri Lanka, other times Tibet.’
Amrit Kaur’s curiosity shot up. ‘But what does he do?’
‘He collects folk songs, from all over India. Punjabi, Gujarati, Marathi, Peshawari, Frontier, Kashmiri, Marwari . . . However many languages are spoken throughout India, and whatever folk songs he can find in those languages, he collects them.’
‘So many songs! What will he do with them?’
‘He writes books, articles . . . so others can also hear about those songs. Many English-language magazines have published his articles. To collect folk songs and then present them skilfully is no ordinary task. Amrit, he’s a very great man, a truly great man. And look how cordially he’s written to me.’
Joginder Singh read out the letter to his wife, the letter that Harendarnath Tirpathi had written to him at his post office address. Harendarnath Tirpathi had praised Joginder Singh’s short stories in a delightfully sweet manner and written, ‘You’re a progressive writer of India.’ When Joginder Singh read this phrase he couldn’t resist commenting, ‘Now see, Tirpathi Sahib also says that I’m a progressive.’
After reading the entire letter aloud Joginder Singh looked at his wife for a few seconds and then asked what she thought of it. ‘So?’
Her husband’s sharp, piercing gaze made Amrit Kaur blush a bit and then she smiled and said, ‘What do I know? This is big man’s talk, only a big man can understand it.’
Joginder Singh didn’t catch the subtlety of her comment; he was somewhat preoccupied with the thought of inviting Harendarnath Tirpathi to stay with him for a while. ‘Amrit,’ he said,
‘shouldn’t we perhaps invite Tirpathi Sahib? What do you think? I wonder whether he might turn down our invitation. After all, he’s a great man. He may think we’re just trying to flatter him.’
On such occasions he always included his wife in the project so the work involved in inviting someone might be shared by both. As soon as he used the word ‘our’ Amrit Kaur, no less naive than her husband, started taking an interest in this Tirpathi fellow, although not only was the man’s name something of a riddle for her, she also failed to comprehend how wandering around collecting folk songs could make someone great. When she was first told that Harendarnath Tirpathi collected folk songs, she was reminded of something her husband had once told her, namely, there were quite a few people in Vilayat* who earned a lot of money catching butterflies. The thought crossed her mind that maybe Tirpathi Sahib had learned collecting folk songs from some fellow from Vilayat.
Joginder Singh expressed his anxiety: ‘Who knows, he might think our invitation is just some kind of flattery.’
‘How could it be just flattery? Other great men come to visit you, don’t they? Write him a letter. Something tells me that he will accept your invitation. Why, he’s also eager to meet you, isn’t he? But tell me: does he have a family? I mean a wife and children.’
‘Family?’ Joginder Singh mumbled, his mind busy composing the contents of the invitation in English. ‘Perhaps. No, I’m sure he does. Come to think of it, I once read in an article that he has a wife and a little girl.’
Now that what he wanted to write in the letter had jelled in his mind, he got up, walked to the other room, took out a small letter pad—the one he used to correspond with only very special people—and started writing to Harendarnath Tirpathi in Urdu, or rather an Urdu translation of what he had thought up in English during the conversation with his wife.
In just three days he received Harendarnath Tirpathi’s response. Joginder Singh opened the envelope with a throbbing heart. Upon reading that his invitation had been accepted, his heart throbbed even faster. His wife was outside in the sunlight rubbing yogurt into their young boy’s hair when Joginder walked over to her with the envelope in hand. ‘He’s accepted my invitation. Says he was coming to Lahore anyway. He’s got some important work to do here . . . Wants to arrange for the publication of his new book. He sends his greetings to you.’
A feeling of immense happiness washed over Amrit thinking that such a great man, who collected folk songs, had sent her his greetings. She thanked God from the depths of her heart for having been married to a man known to every great man in India.
It was the early days of a wintry November. Joginder Singh woke up around seven in the morning but lingered in bed with his eyes wide open. His wife and son lay on a cot nearby under a warm quilt. Joginder started thinking about how immensely happy he would feel meeting Tirpathi Sahib, and the latter no less happy meeting Joginder Singh, India’s youthful, up-and-coming short story writer and progressive man of letters. He would engage Tirpathi Sahib on every subject under the sun: folk songs, village dialects, short stories, recent events of the war, etc., etc. He would tell him how, despite being just a hard-working office clerk, he became a good writer. Amazing, wasn’t it, that someone who sorted mail was by disposition an artist?
Joginder Singh was mighty proud that even after toiling half the day like a common labourer at the post office he could still find the time to edit a monthly magazine, and contribute stories to two, even three publications, to say nothing of those long letters he sent off to friends weekly.
He lay in bed for quite a while, preparing himself mentally for his approaching meeting with Harendarnath Tirpathi. He had read his stories and essays and had also seen his photograph. Usually, just reading someone’s stories and seeing his photo made Joginder Singh feel that he had come to know the person quite well. But in Harendarnath Tirpathi’s case, he couldn’t trust himself. Sometimes he felt that Tirpathi was a complete stranger. In his fiction writer’s mind, the man appeared wrapped in reams of paper rather than clothes. And the paper reminded him of the wall in Anarkali bazaar. It was plastered from one end to the other with so many layers of cinema ads that it seemed as if a second wall had sprung up in front of the original.
What if Tirpathi Sahib turned out to be such a man—Joginder Singh wondered still lying in bed. In that case it would be very difficult to understand him. Later, when he remembered his own penetrating intelligence, all his uncertainties evaporated in an instant. He got up and began preparing for Tirpathi’s reception.
It had been settled in their correspondence that Harendarnath Tirpathi would make his way to Joginder Singh’s house himself; this because he hadn’t yet decided whether to travel by lorry or train. And that Joginder Singh would take Monday off and wait for his guest at home the whole day.
After bathing and changing, Joginder Singh walked into the kitchen and sat with his wife for a long time. They took their tea quite late, thinking that Tirpathi might arrive soon. But when he didn’t, they put the cake and other food back into the cupboard and just drank tea while they waited for the guest.
Eventually, Joginder Singh got up and went into the other room. He was standing in front of the mirror sticking hairpins into his beard to keep it neatly pressed down when there was a knock at the door. He left his beard half-finished and dashed to the deorhi to open the door. As expected, it was Harendarnath Tirpathi’s lush, black jungle of a beard, at least twenty times bigger than his own, that first came into view.
A smile fluttered across Harendarnath Tirpathi’s lips, buried as they were under the thick mop of his moustache. One of his eyes, which was slightly crooked, became even more crooked. He jerked his unbelievably long hair and stuck out his hand—as calloused as a peasant’s—towards Joginder Singh, who was greatly impressed by the steely grip and equally so by his leather bag that was as distended as a pregnant woman. ‘Tirpathi Sahib, I’m very pleased to meet you’ was all he could get out of his mouth.
It has been fifteen days since Harendarnath Tirpathi’s arrival. His wife and daughter had been with him on the journey but they decided to stay at the home of a distant relative who lived in the Mozang area of Lahore. Tirpathi didn’t think it proper for them to stay there long; two days later he had them move into Joginder Singh’s house.
They spent the first four days talking many quite interesting things. Joginder Singh was very pleased to hear Harendarnath Tirpathi applaud his short stories. He read him an unpublished piece and received great praise. He even read him two stories he hadn’t quite finished and Tirpathi expressed a good opinion about these as well. They also discussed progressive literature, noted technical flaws in a number of writers, and made a comparison of old and new poetry. In short, those four days brought them a surfeit of enjoyment. Tirpathi’s personality left a deep impression on Joginder Singh. What he particularly liked about the man was his way of talking, at once childish and wise. The man’s beard, twenty times bigger than his own, totally overwhelmed his thoughts, and the image of his long, jet-black hair, that had something of the flow of folk songs, never left Joginder Singh’s eyes, not even when he took care of the mail at the post office.
Tirpathi completely claimed Joginder Singh’s heart during these four days. He was so enamoured of the man that even his crooked eye now seemed infinitely beautiful to him, so beautiful in fact that he concluded that had the eye not been crooked, Tirpathi’s face could never have looked so graceful.
Every time Tirpathi’s thick lips moved under his bushy moustache, Joginder Singh imagined a bevy of birds warbling sweetly in the bushes. Tirpathi spoke slowly and gently, and now and then when he caressed his beard, Joginder Singh felt a sense of immense comfort, as though his own heart was being caressed with tender love.
The atmosphere during those four days was such that, had he even tried, Joginder Singh couldn’t have succeeded in describing it in any of his stories. But—voila!—on the fifth day Tirpathi suddenly opened his leather bag and started reading his
own short stories aloud and kept it up relentlessly for the next ten days. He must have read out the equivalent of several books.
Joginder Singh was mightily fed up. He developed an absolute aversion to short stories. Tirpathi’s leather bag, puffed up like some moneylender’s protruding belly, became a source of unending torment. Every evening, as he was returning from work, the fear that he might run into Tirpathi the moment he stepped through the doorway gripped his heart. When he reached home, they would exchange a few words and Tirpathi would open his bag and subject Joginder Singh to a couple of his short stories.
Had Joginder Singh not been a progressive, he would have told his guest flatly, ‘Enough, enough, Tirpathi Sahib, that’s quite enough. I have no more strength left to listen to your stories. Please . . .’ But he thought, ‘No, no, I’m a progressive. I shouldn’t say this. It’s my own fault that I no longer like his stories. They must have something good in them. After all, I did like his stories before. In fact, I thought they were excellent. I . . . I’ve become biased.’
For one whole week this conflict continued to ravage Joginder Singh’s progressive mind. He thought so hard and so much that he reached a point where he couldn’t think any more. All kinds of thoughts assailed his mind, but he’d lost the ability to sort them out properly. Slowly his confusion grew so intense and unforgiving that he began to hallucinate: he imagined he was stranded in a gigantic house during a hurricane, the numerous windows being blown open by gusts of merciless wind and he didn’t know how to close them all at once.
A full twenty days passed but Tirpathi showed no sign of leaving. Joginder Singh began to feel edgy. Every evening when Tirpathi treated him to a fresh story he’d written during the day, Joginder only heard flies buzzing in his ears and his mind began to wander.
One evening Tirpathi read out a brand new story that focused on the sexual relations of a man and a woman. Joginder Singh was shocked to realize that for exactly three weeks he had spent every night sleeping under the same covers with a long-bearded man rather than with his own wife. The thought stirred up a veritable riot inside of him, at least for a moment. ‘Heavens, what a guest I’m stuck with!’ he said to himself. ‘Is he a leech or something? Why doesn’t he leave? And why am I forgetting his Begum Sahiba and daughter. The whole family has moved in. He hasn’t even considered that it will crush us poor people. I’m an ordinary employee of the post office. All I make is fifty rupees a month. How long will I have to play host to him? And listen to his short stories that just keep coming one after the other? I’m a human being after all, not some metal footlocker. And worst of all, I can’t even sleep with my wife. These long winter nights, my God, how they’ve been wasted!’
My Name Is Radha Page 30
