River of Fire

by Qurratulain Hyder

  His Air India ticket for the flight back to Delhi lay on another table. Everything material and solid. That urn was as real as the chair or the sofa or the teacups bought in a department store’s bargain basement.

  What could be more trite than the event of dying?

  One cries at other people’s deaths, then dies oneself.

  Nirmala had spent all her earthly days planning for the future, sitting up whole nights preparing for college examinations, praying fervently for a first division. All right. Please god, at least give us a good second division with perhaps a distinction or two. Okay, god, just see to it that I get through. Then she had this great anxiety about the Nation and the Country. Forever arguing, agitating, leading processions, discussing socio-economic problems. When she did get a first division she insisted that she be sent to no less a place than Cambridge. Well, she got a scholarship and was overjoyed.

  For the first few days she hadn’t quite believed that she was actually in Cambridge, but then she started making fresh plans. She would work and help Father pay off the family debts, she would find a lovely bride for her dear brother, Hari, later still, when she had saved a little money herself, she would embark on a world tour. First she would visit Outer Mongolia, then Mexico, Chile, Peru, etc. She was frightfully keen on Outer Mongolia—she simply had to go there. It sounded so remote, literally out of this world. She also vaguely hoped she’d have a house of her own with a lily pond. She would call it Neelpadam Kunj.

  Then of course she wanted to buy all the saris in India. And she insisted on a pearl-and-turquoise jewellery set like her married sister, Laj. She would often make guest lists for her wedding. Tonight her friends had all assembled, but not for her wedding. Dinner was being made in the kitchen, Surekha’s shadow moved to and fro on a window. Talat sat down on the floor and made an attempt to pack Nirmala’s belongings. Saris, cardigans, shoes, slacks, bangles, books. She opened a handbag—it was full of bus tickets, half-used lipsticks, a one pound note and a few pennies, hairpins, bills. A half-torn envelope with the smudged post-mark of Behraich, 1943, slipped out of a book. Gautam’s glossy picture peeped out. It had been mailed to Nirmala’s parents after they had sent her marriage proposal to the ‘boy’s’ father according to Hindu custom.

  Talat looked blankly at the photograph. Then she picked up a red pencil and scribbled “Dead Letter Post Office” across the envelope, put it underneath some other papers in Nirmala’s cabin trunk and returned to the living room.

  64. Windsong on the Heath

  “‘At Tehmina Appie’s wedding,’ Nirmala declared with much aplomb, ‘I’m going to wear a gold-and-silver Ganga-Jamni lehnga.’

  “‘I’ll put on a Banarasi sari,’ Malti said demurely, like a grown-up woman. Malti, Nirmala’s cousin was sixteen, Nirmala was two years younger, and I was a year younger than Nirmala. I listened to them in awe, because I only wore frocks . . .”

  After a pause, Talat said to Kamal, “Don’t you see this is so futile. My past is important only to myself, others can find little meaning in it.”

  “My past is my own,” Kamal repeated.

  “And the world is only interested in the present,” Hari Shankar’s voice resounded.

  “But the past is present and the present is the past, and also the future,” Talat replied. “See, this is also the Qoranic concept of Time, an Egyptian scholar at the Islamic Centre once told me. He asked me to read Mohyeddin Ibn-el-Arabi, the Spanish metaphysician. But how much can one know? Time is a juggler, it goes on persecuting me. Why doesn’t any one of you come to my rescue?”

  “Even Einstein cannot help you, Talat Begum,” said Hari Shankar heartlessly.

  “What possible interest can the world have in my past, I ask you?” Kamal insisted. He buzzed around and stopped at the calendar. It was December 15, 1954. They were sitting by the fireside in a cosy pre-war flat in St. John’s Wood. Their shadows made strange patterns upon the walls. A Mozart concert was being broadcast from Vienna, and the London Underground vibrated faintly underfoot, carrying multitudes to unknown destinations in the Black Hole.

  In a similar darkness of time Talat had leaned against the veranda railing of Water Chestnut House in the month of July 1939, talking to Nirmala Raizada. She was no different from the girl in St. John’s Wood, yet they were two different personalities. The Buddha has said that man changes every instant—he is different in childhood, in youth and in old age. You were not there before this moment, only a continuum remains. Glaciers floated on faraway oceans and blue winds roared across terrible mountains. Time was fluid. Time was frozen.

  “We want to reassure ourselves by repeating our story,” said Hari Shankar, “for we are scared as hell.”

  “Time shall devour us and darkness shall be our last refuge. It’s sad to think that despite his high-falutin’ philosophy Gautam Nilambar turned out to be a frightened little mouse,” said Talat.

  “Forget Gautam or we’ll drift from the real issue. The point is, I was Hari Shankar fourteen years ago and shall be considered Hari Shankar fourteen years hence as well. And after all the experiments which we’ll be subjected to, we, Time’s little guinea pigs, will perish without a squeal.”

  Talat nodded. Though thousands of Talats existed on countless planes, scattered in myriads of pieces, the same face is reflected separately in the several bits of a broken mirror. One could only travel forward; to return was not possible.

  Kamal looked at everybody through the eyes of a fly. Michael. Bill Craig. Zarina. Gulshan. Surekha. He buzzed around again and settled on the head of the Laughing Buddha. Then he flew up to the calendar and began crawling over December 15, 1954. Why should we flies be so upset by the death of one among us? Do we fly on to a heaven or to hell after we stop buzzing?

  Early next morning Hari Shankar was flying to India. After much discussion it had been decided that he would carry the urn with his sister’s ashes in his handbag. Nirmala had turned into a piece of luggage with an Air India tag on it, it was as simple as that. He would carry the urn by train to Kashi and submerge it in the Ganges. And that would be that.

  “A frightened little mouse, despite all his intellectual bravado,” Talat repeated, shaking her head sorrowfully.

  “What is Gautam? A mere illusion.”

  “Oh, Hari, don’t start your pseud-giri at 11 o’clock in the morning,” Talat said in tired voice.

  For some moments no one spoke. To Talat they looked like dumb toys. A soldier with a little tin gun in his hand, Michael. Ancient, grey-haired, sad-faced, oriental philosopher, Hari Shankar. The almond-eyed dancer of Emperor Chandragupta Maurya’s court, Surekha. The utterly sophisticated Nawab Kamman of King Ghaziuddin Hyder and Vajid Ali Shah’s Durbar, Kamal. They sat there adorning the niches in the wall, clay dolls for Diwali, miniature figurines moulded by the expert potters of Old Lucknow. One of them, Nirmala, had recently fallen off and broken, so one niche was empty.

  In accordance with Muslim folk beliefs, if somebody is missing in India, an Aamil or Muslim practitioner of white magic is summoned. He puts a little kajal—lamp-black mixed with ghee—on the right thumb-nail of an innocent child. Then he recites some Quranic verses and the child begins to glimpse the place and the person who is lost on his thumb-nail. Qadeer used to say, “First a sweeper appears and sweeps the ground, then the bhishti comes wearing his red apron, bent double with the weight of his water-skin. He sprinkles water. Then a throne is brought. The King of the Genii arrives and sits on it and the viewer gets to know what he wants to know.”

  Talat looked hard at her thumb and only saw Cutex nail polish on it. She felt very unhappy. “I wish we were back in Neelampur,” she thought. “Qadeer would have told the village maulvi, ‘We have lost Nirmal Bitiya. She has put on the Sulaiman topi1 and can’t be seen by anyone. Please find out where she is. Or maybe her enemies did black magic on her, that is why she died so young.’”

  She saw Bill and Michael regarding her with concern as she stared vacantly at her right thumb-nail.
She frowned. Shall I tell them about this occult practice of ours? Omigosh—they’ll laugh their heads off. Do you really believe in voodoo? And then they’ll think, well, after all, she is basically a backward, benighted, medieval Oriental, she really can’t relate to us post-Reformation Occidentals.

  Shall I tell them tales of black magic performed on moonless Diwali nights? And the churails whose feet are turned backward, who speak through their noses and live in bamboo clusters during the monsoons and in peepal trees on hot, summer afternoons. They eat handsome young men. . . . And there is this world of shining beings—devas and angels, and eternal happiness and light. Nirmal has crossed The Barrier. Has she seen the Unseen? She was one of us, now she is one of them, the light, airy, holy beings—or maybe there is absolutely no Afterlife.

  When they brought Gautam back from Zarina’s cottage in Osterly he remained ill and bedridden for a week. Sometimes in his delirium he came out with a lot of classical Urdu poetry. Once the doctor arrived while Gautam was quoting an eighteenth-century poet with much drama:

  Chali simt-e-ghaib se ek hawa, ke chaman surroor ka jal gaya.

  Magar ek shakh-e-nihal-i-gham, jise dil kahain, so hari rahi.

  He sat up and thundered—

  Khabar-i-tahayyur-i-ishq sun, na junoon raha na pari rahi.

  Na to tu raha, na to main raha, jo rahi so bekhabari rahi.2

  He fell back against his pillows and closed his eyes like a stage Majnun.

  The old physician was baffled. “What was your boyfriend saying, young lady?”

  Talat was aghast. “He is my adopted brother,” she replied stonily. Then she remembered, they did not have these adopted brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, etc., out here in the West.

  “Well, what was your adopted brother saying? Is he an actor?”

  “No, sir, he is a part-time philosopher of sorts.” She pointed towards the placard on the kitchen door which said, “Thinker’s Den.”

  The doctor smiled, recalling his own student days.

  “Sir, the poet my brother quoted, says:

  From the direction of the Unknown arrived a gust of wind and blighted the garden of joy

  But a bough of the Tree of Sorrow, called ‘heart’, is green for evermore.

  Behold the wonderment of love, the madness and the fairy both vanished

  Neither the patchwork of sanity remained, nor the revelations made by madness.

  You did not remain you, nor I, I. Only non-awareness survived.”

  This must be the Wisdom of East, the good doctor decided. He wrote out a prescription in his state of awareness and left hastily. He wanted to get out of the room which contained the presence of death in the form of the sick man.

  Kamal and Hari Shankar bullied Gautam into getting well within a week. He was well enough to return to his job in the United States, and after seeing him off at the airport his friends returned to Talat’s flat for lunch. The rooms were full of packed luggage. Kamal was also leaving Britain.

  “Let’s get some fresh air,” Gulshan suggested after lunch.

  On the way to Hampstead Heath they passed little back gardens, crossed narrow, cobbled lanes and half-lit tea-rooms. Office girls were returning from work. It was an Eliotonian cityscape.

  “Some peaceful scenes inspire pure terror in me,” said Michael.

  “Yes,” Talat replied.

  “We must never try to drag others into our own scenes.”

  “Or into our dreams,” replied Talat. “My past, my time, my dreams are mine, they cannot belong to anybody else. Though you mustn’t forget,” she added hastily, “I am talking on a strictly personal level. The future is the same for all of us.”

  “For heaven’s sake,” Michael said irritably, “don’t go on following the Party line. The bloody future lurks over there beyond the hill, with open jaws, ready to devour us separately . . . like Hari’s ten-armed black goddess. I am going to Israel, Kamal to India which does not recognise Israel. Where the hell is a common destination for humanity? Only the process of extinction is common to us all.”

  “I was perfectly all right,” said Talat and then, all of a sudden realised with a shock that people’s minds are at different stages in the million year evolution of the human brain.

  “There were other things, too, that scared me. The landscape after the rains; friends; comfortable houses. When I opened my bags all kinds of documents popped out—bank correspondence, stocks and shares, the biannual reports of joint stock companies. Strange names that were familiar in an impersonal sort of way. The world of the Boards of Directors—Lord Sinha, Sir Biren Mukerjee, Shri C Thapar, Dr. K. Hameed. There was another world hidden behind these names. Magnificent buildings, classy, modern offices. Money, money, money. Strikes, hunger, unemployment. Director’s Meetings. Trade Unions. Apex Diamond Mines of South Africa. Slums. The City of London. Clive Row, Calcutta. Bishop’s Gate. Chowringhee. Tata-nagar. Andrew Yule, Calcutta. Martin Burns. Spencers, Madras. Indian Iron and Steel Ltd. Cipla Ltd., Bombay.

  “I signed on their dotted lines. These shares belonged to me, given to me by my father. These papers perhaps symbolised my economic security and bore witness to my considerable status in society. What use is all this to me? Mere pieces of paper. Money, money. In 1947 I lost all sense of the value of money.”

  Kamal took his cue from her: “It was revealed that there was more confusion in the universe than we had imagined. The world had gone wonky.”

  A Salvation Army band marched past, playing “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

  Talat resumed speaking: “Before I knew it I had embarked upon the . . . shall I say . . . the dangerous journey of thought, sailing on a sea of words.”

  A dim sun was reflected in the lake. “What are words?” asked Talat. “What is reality? The books say: words are wrong, there is no meaning. Relationships are futile. Sometimes I felt that Brahaspati was imparting his knowledge to the demons. In medieval Europe they burned women at the stake. Often I saw myself as a little witch, blindly flying around astride the broom of my so-called learning.

  “Many other brooms whizzed past, ridden by countless other young women . . . Tehmina, Nirmala, Surekha, Feroze, Nargis Cowasjee, Shanta, Champa, and many more. These brooms had flown so high that it was impossible now to bring them back to earth. In fact, the skies over the whole world were full of such brooms. Now, Champa Ahmed made the mistake of dozing. Look, I am a daastan-go, and for a dastaango all of life is an allegory.

  “Now, if you are riding a broom and you fall asleep, you’re bound to lose your way and crash-land in the middle of nowhere.

  “In her dream-condition she floated around singing like the Vaishnava devotees of Bengal. Champa Baji also thought she was a seeker—while my own discovery is ‘Seek . . . and Ye Shall Not Find’. She envied the Catholic nuns. When I was a teenager and very self-righteous, I disliked her immensely because I thought she was a happiness-grabber and tried to steal other people’s happiness. She robbed Amir from Tehmina and Gautam from Nirmala. However, when she was coming down with her bag of loot somebody pulled the step-ladder from under her feet. Let’s go for a walk, and I’ll tell you more about Champa’s Follies.”

  “I too have some idea of the symbolism of things,” said Michael, spreading his hands in the dark air. “I have suffered a lot because of it.” A plane flew overhead and disappeared into the clouds. They gazed after it.

  “The City of Unknowing that we founded, we built its citadels with the bricks of philosophy,” Talat said. “One day Death the Burglar broke in and tiptoed into our towers.

  “Two years ago, we visited the Farnborough Air Show where poor John Derry died breaking the sound barrier—his aircraft exploded in mid-air, killing many. At the instant that its engine hurtled towards me from the sky, I knew my time had come . . . Instead of falling face downwards on the ground, I began scurrying around looking for Zarina and Chandra. I was worried only about them, it didn’t occur to me that I should try to save myself. So, when Nirmala faced deat
h she, too, wouldn’t have been afraid.”

  “The Vedanta mentions four states of existence—the waking man; dream; dreamless sleep; and death,” Hari Shankar intoned like a priest. “Death is the only human experience which cannot be shared. So we left Nirmal alone to conduct this experiment entirely on her own. She was carried away by the strong currents of the River, struggling hard to fight the waves in the dark.

  “Maharaja Janak said: ‘Mithila is burning, but I remain’. We are all burning.” Hari Shankar turned to Michael, “Hasn’t the heat of the flames reached you?”

  Kamal had gone down the hill and begun to sing.

  “When my grandma died the family pandit told us the soul flees from the flames into the night,” said Hari Shankar, “from the night into the waxing moon, from the moon into the world of gods and into the world of winds, passing through the atmosphere, smoke, clouds, rainfall and plants. The smoke of sacrifice changes from air to smoke, and then into frost and clouds and rain, and falls on the earth as snow. All souls evaporate in the atmosphere . . .Where did Nirmal go from the crematorium?”

  “The winds shall carry away my breath, the sun shall draw a blind over my eyes, the moon shall put me to sleep. The hair of my body is being turned into shrubs and nettles, trees grow out of my head, blood is transformed into water,” said Talat.

  “Deep sleep, deep waters, deep dreams,” intoned Hari Shankar.“The elements are meditation. The winds have gone to sleep, only death remains. The body thinks and feels; when it finishes, everything else finishes too. The burning fire, cool water, pleasant winds, have all come out of their own swabhav.” He raised his right hand in a gesture unknown to himself. To Talat he looked at that moment like the red-robed priest of Kali she had once seen at Kali Ghat.