Once Upon a Curfew

by Srishti Chaudhary

  They began from somewhere in the middle of the movie and the familiar vision of Madhubala dancing to ‘Pyaar kiya toh darna kya’ appeared on screen. Indu stared at the screen and eventually realized that Rana was repeating all the dialogues passionately. Indu joined him wherever she could. Half an hour later, she felt a touch on her arm and saw Rana leaning towards her, realizing a few seconds later that he was handing her a note.

  ‘What is this?’ she asked him in a low voice, not wanting to alert Fawad.

  ‘I told you I’d write you a poem,’ he whispered.

  She unfolded the crushed bit of paper slowly.

  Salim ne Anarkali ko marne nahi diya

  Shehenshah ne use jeene nahi diya

  Ek din mai bhi baitha aur socha

  Ki uparwaale se maine ab tak kya liya?

  Khoobsurat banaya, dilkash banaya

  Phir bhi Anarkali ko pasand nahi aaya

  Aur phir ek andheri sham

  Sab samajh mein aaya

  Rajesh Khanna se Rana bana diya

  Superstar se waqil bana diya

  Anarkali ki ajeeb hassi sunkar

  Ek darpok Salim bana diya

  Indu clutched the piece of paper in her hand, shaking because she couldn’t stop giggling. She looked directly into Rana’s eyes; he had an arm behind the extra chair and seemed to be enjoying her amusement. She was still chuckling when she leaned forward and said, ‘I’ll get back to you with one of mine on this.’

  Rana stuck out his lower lip and said to her, ‘Woh shayari hee kya jo sochne pe aaye?’

  She stuck her arm out for the little notebook in his hands, and he gladly handed it to her with a pen. She thought about it for a couple of minutes, and then scribbled, handing it to him. It said,

  Shayari hai,

  Hazir-jawaabi nahi

  Pratiyogita hai,

  Pyaar nahi

  He sniggered when he read it, conceding by raising his hands. The movie went on without further interruptions, with the Shehenshah declaring to Anarkali the price of Salim’s life: being buried alive in the wall. ‘Kaneez Jalal-uddin Mohammad Akbar ko apna khoon maaf karti hai!’ Rana shouted at the screen along with Madhubala as Indu exchanged a giggle with Fawad, who, though used to such displays of enthusiasm from his roommate, was still amused. The loudest cheer, though, came when Prithviraj Kapoor released Anarkali at the end, and Rana yelled out along with the Shehenshah’s booming voice, ‘Hum mohabbat ke dushman nahi, apne usolon ke gulaam hain!’

  Indu hit him lightly on the shoulder, got up and walked to the switchboard to switch on the light. The sun had set by this time and the room was dark. ‘Alright, calm down there, shehenshah,’ she said.

  ‘Come on, we need to go downstairs now, Natty will be back any minute,’ she told them. After checking that everything was in order, they locked the flat carefully and took the stairs down. Indu handed Rana her bag, which he took with an exaggerated sigh.

  ‘This is how you treat Salim, hun?’ he asked.

  ‘Depends on the kind of Salim I’m dealing with,’ Indu said, shaking her head. ‘That Salim offered to make Anarkali his mallika, the queen of the whole kingdom. What do you offer me, hun? Just your witty little jokes.’

  ‘As if you don’t feel like enough of a queen already,’ Rana said, yawning.

  There was an evening lull in the air, and traffic moved slowly outside the gates of Ganpati Tower. Inside, a few kids went around on a bicycle.

  ‘You can go on,’ Indu heard Rana tell Fawad meaningfully. ‘I’ll wait here with Indu till her driver comes.’

  She pretended not to have heard him, and Fawad said a short goodbye to her, walking out of the gates. She and Rana chatted for a few minutes till she saw Natty glide over in the Ambassador, parking outside the gates. ‘I am back, madame,’ Natty said. He held the pamphlets in his hand.

  ‘You can put the pamphlets upstairs,’ she told him, ‘and then we can leave.’ He nodded courteously and headed upstairs, leaving her alone with Rana at the gate. Rana looked at her directly and Indu looked away.

  ‘A bit of a cool summer night, eh?’ she asked him, stroking both her arms with her hands.

  ‘I have a solution for that,’ he said, laughing, opening his arms wide, facing her. Indu folded her arms and turned the other way, but couldn’t help laughing as well. Rana saw Natty’s silhouette heading towards them from the building.

  ‘So I’ll see you tomorrow? Big day,’ he said to Indu, and she nodded.

  ‘Well, goodbye,’ she said to Rana, wondering what else she could add, as Natty came up and went to the driver’s side of the car.

  Rana gave a slight nod and then turned to Natty. ‘Goodbye,’ he said, and then with added emotion, ‘I’ll miss you, Natty!’ Indu smiled and got into the back of the car.

  She was looking forward to tomorrow, although she was a bit nervous. She would definitely wear her sea-green sari, the one with the brocade border, which she had gotten from Jaipur a couple of years ago but had not yet had the chance to wear. This was something that she could wear it to with pride, something of her own doing—the woman in the sea-green sari who was in charge there. Along with Rana.

  She wondered what he would wear, and how they’d look standing together. She decided that she’d glance at him a few times while making the speech so everyone would know that he had an important role. His stupid, wavy hair would lie perfectly on his stupid, little head, and the stubble on his face would make his smile stand out even more.

  He was always ready for anything—to take up responsibility, walk with her, eat a mutton burra, build a bookcase, make a stupid joke, and bring up Rajesh Khanna. Her mind went back to him constantly, imagining him telling Fawad to say to her, ‘Tell her I’m very responsible, that I lock all the doors and windows at night’, and shrugging off Fawad’s incredulous look, bribing him with a night’s dinner in exchange. She thought of him running his hand through his hair, asking her why she needed that thick coat, of sitting back in the chair and talking about their chemistry.

  She reached home with Rana still on her mind, only to find people sitting inside her drawing room, all looking up in delight as she appeared before them with a tired face.

  Supriya aunty stood up first. In her head, Indu still called her that, although she had insisted Indu call her ‘mummy’. ‘Just like you address your own mother,’ but there was still so much time, and besides, it didn’t come naturally to Indu.

  ‘Indu,’ she beamed. Indu gulped as she remembered that she was her future daughter-in-law. ‘How are you?’ she asked as Indu bent to touch her feet, and murmured that she was fine.

  Then Balwant uncle got up from the sofa, and Indu bent again. He blessed her and put his arm on her shoulder.

  Her own parents nodded at her smilingly, motioning that she join them, and Amita waved and poured her a cup of tea.

  ‘We just couldn’t help dropping by,’ said Supriya aunty directly to Indu. ‘We were coming back from a friend’s and then we thought, let’s say hi to our daughter.’

  Indu listened carefully, nodding and chewing a biscuit she picked up from a plate on the table, which gave her time to think. ‘I was just coming back from the library. Tomorrow is the movie screening, as you know. I am very excited to have you there!’ she added, looking meaningfully at her mother, who, she was sure, would have invited them. Supriya aunty’s laugh confirmed her assumption.

  ‘This girl is just too talented,’ said Balwant uncle, looking at Indu and then at her parents. ‘I tell Rajat to count his lucky stars all the time.’ Everyone else laughed while Indu gave a weak smile. A wave of guilt washed over her as she watched her mother’s smiling face, her sister arranging things, and her father looking proudly back and forth between her and Rajat’s parents.

  They spoke about her and Rajat and looking forward to having her around more. They mentioned that Rajat had settled quite well in London and was now considering a few possibilities, but they would be quite happy to have him living wherever he deemed fit.
At first, Indu stared blankly at them all, but slowly gathered herself and entered the conversation.

  She told them about her correspondence with Rajat and about all that she had been up to in setting up the library. They listened interestedly, but the conversation kept going back to Rajat and Indu, and behind the clatter of plates and spoons, Indu hid her quietness, this reality reminding her of a direction in life she had completely forgotten about.

  * * *

  The bright morning brought with itself a stillness that only comes with the assurance of summer, that it is here, and here to stay. Indu awoke before it was time. Her mind was clear and purposeful. She dressed with care, folding all the pleats of her sari with precision. One by one, she asked Natty to carry out each task she had allocated for him, coordinating with her sister. She reassured her mother that she didn’t need more help. It was one of those times that the extra reservoir of confidence in your being opens up, at the right time, right when it’s needed.

  When she got into the car with her sister, she felt slightly nervous, but she chatted as if it was just another day. She smiled at Amita, staring at the mole on her chin, her face worn down by the past couple of years but still shining with interest, especially when she looked at her sister.

  ‘Are you excited?’ she asked Indu.

  ‘Yes . . . I really am.’

  Upon reaching, she saw that Esha was already waiting outside Ganpati Tower, standing a little way off from Tinku Ram and Nathu Ram. Indu nodded at them all, giving an extra smile to Esha, and led the way up the stairs. Unlocking Number 7, she immediately set them to work. The next hour was spent getting everything arranged, only briefly interrupted by Rana’s arrival, who also immediately went about setting up the mic and his desk. She introduced her sister to him, and Amita smiled kindly at his enthusiastic hello, complimenting him on his shirt. Only then did Indu notice what he was wearing.

  She went up to him, deliberately looking him up and down, arms folded, contorting her face in contemplation as he waited. He wore a white shirt with trousers and a blazer, which she presumed was his lawyer get-up, his hair combed neatly to one side. The blazer prevented him looking tall and lanky, and he gave her a pompous nod before smiling. A thin moustache would have completed his lawyerly look, but Indu had only ever seen him at extremes: either with a beard or shaved clean.

  ‘You pass,’ she said, and his face broke into a grin. She stared at him, waiting for him to say something back.

  ‘And?’ she said, her voice threatening.

  ‘Eh,’ he said, moving his hands to say ‘so-so’. She knew he was pulling her leg, but she still narrowed her eyes at him and turned away.

  ‘Come on,’ he said laughing. ‘Are your parents coming as well?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, remembering last night, ‘they will be here.’

  ‘Uff,’ he said, rubbing his forehead as if in tension, ‘I hope they don’t ask about how much I’ll be earning in the future.’

  Indu stared at him for a few seconds, unable to say anything. Finally, she said she had to check something in the kitchen. She told Esha how much tea to put in each cup, where to place the empty cups and how to arrange the food. ‘Make sure all used plates and cups are removed as soon as they are set down. You have to serve everyone, and make sure there are no dirty things on the table.’

  Amita went up and down the flat as her friends began arriving, showing them the way, and Rana took his place by the front desk, talking to whoever came in, explaining about the library, its facilities, its membership and planned activities. Indu looked at him proudly before entering the conversation to explain the concept.

  More people began filing in, and Indu grew more and more nervous by the minute. Finally, her parents entered with Rajat’s parents, and Indu went to greet them, uttering pleasantries. When she saw that Rana was nearby, she introduced them to him, hoping that he would behave himself.

  ‘Rana is Mrs Bala’s student,’ she told them and he gave an earnest nod. ‘He’s helping me with the project.’

  Her father patted him on the shoulder in response, and her mother asked him a couple of questions before others came up to them and started a conversation. There were many women, most of them Amita’s friends, of various ages, dressed in saris and suits, and a few in trousers. Indu spotted Mrs Bala, who had just come in followed by a bunch of girls, and both she and Rana went to greet them. They directed them to where each kind of books was kept, and where they would screen the movie.

  A few minutes after the official time, Rana was urging Indu to begin when Supriya aunty and Balwant uncle came up to them.

  She stared at Rana, who was smiling, and said, ‘Rana, meet Supriya aunty and Balwant uncle, my future parents-in-law.’ She saw the smile fade from his face slowly, and then reappear as he responded to their ‘namaste ji’. She walked away after that, her heart heavy. But the need to take the stage made her collect herself. She clutched the paper with her speech on it and went to the mic as Rana and Amita asked everyone to settle down. Her parents sat at the back in a corner, and she could see them looking at her attentively. She also spotted Fawad in the seats, and about fifty more people staring up at her. It felt like she was at one of the debates at her college, especially with Mrs Bala and the girls from her college in the audience.

  Now that the room had quieted and people seemed to be waiting only for her, Indu felt a pang of nervousness in her stomach. She began the speech she had prepared. Her throat felt dry. She saw Rana staring at her from the desk and took a deep breath.

  ‘Good morning, everyone, and many thanks to all of you who took the time to wake up early on the weekend and made an effort to be here today,’ she began. ‘I’d like to talk for a bit and explain what this place, this library and its set-up, is about before we go on to screen the movie. I am sure all of you have seen Mughal-e-Azam, but a classic like that needs to be watched again and again until we know it well enough to scream out the lines to each other, even better than the characters themselves.’

  She looked at Rana, and he nodded once, smiling.

  ‘Everyone asks me—asks us—what is it, this library, and what do we aim to achieve with it? In its basic form, we have books here left by my grandmother, who passed away.

  ‘We really hope that we’ll get donations to keep adding new reads very, very frequently. If you have books lying around at home that you don’t think you’ll read, we would be glad to house them. The idea as such is that we have a variety of books here, and anyone who is a member can borrow and issue them to read as per their need. But behind this is also a larger aim, a larger idea, one that we hope will convey itself without too much trouble and best be understood in practice. Yet, I will try to explain.

  ‘It has been almost twenty-seven years since we got Independence, yet, in the building and progress of a young and free India, among those who have been left behind are women. Nowhere in the world is a woman so truly worshipped, so greatly idolized, yet so pathetically deplored. While the literacy rate for the male population in the country is slightly short of forty per cent, for the women, it’s just eighteen per cent, less than even half that of men. While men get countless chances, time after time, to educate and train themselves, to stand on their own two feet, to maintain and support a family, to feel able and in control, the women have to simply stand by and surrender their fate to the forces of society that govern their lives at every point.

  ‘In that situation, it is important to sit and just think for some time, what is it that holds us back? Why don’t we have jobs that bring home money, and why aren’t there more of us in the Parliament, elected and voted, to formulate laws and policies? What is it that keeps us from achieving and being something that comes so easily to the other sex, but is rare and exemplary for us? Where does it all begin to go wrong? We have the same faculties. The Prime Minister is a woman, and the roads haven’t collapsed, the railways haven’t stopped working! In fact, we are making progress.’

  Indu paused to take a si
p of water from the bottle in front of her and was suddenly aware that each and every pair of eyes was on her, each person listening in singular attention. Somehow, the thought gave her more confidence. She went back to her paper.

  ‘I don’t believe it’s because we are born less intelligent or are in any way less capable, but we are still not equal when the statistics reveal themselves. It is because we are not given a fair chance, a fair opportunity; that we are given a few things, the scraps and the leftovers, simply because the law says we must. We are given the right to education, but not the conditions that facilitate the smooth functioning of this process—clean public toilets, the transport required to reach the educational institute, the safety that needs to be assured to a marginalized group. Are we given the time to bloom and flourish, or the encouragement needed to move forward and chase the goal we set for ourselves in life? Are we given a quiet room of our own and three hours a day to study in peace, to take time out for ourselves, to train our minds to be better every day?

  ‘The Library at No. 7 is an attempt to create an alternative space that might have been denied to you in your life, denied to the extent that you don’t even realize that it must exist in the first place. In your daily humdrum routine, we provide you with a space where you can find time for yourself. We encourage you to spend at least a few hours every day to sit and read here. To pick up a book that you have been meaning to read but haven’t gotten around to. To flip through a magazine or cookbook without your kids running about. To find the space and time to study for that teaching diploma.

  ‘Most of all, we hope that you will come here to engage and relate with other women who think like you, who will laugh in your company, give you a little tip that might prove useful. So that together we might form a community that will raise each other, for when we have been put down for so long, a little support can go a long way. We ask that you register to become a member. Membership is absolutely free and will give you access to a large number of books. We will organize activities and workshops, little courses that you can take to learn something new, and a movie screening every week. Most of all, you get a space of your own, one absolutely free from any diversions, to use your free time as you want. We hope that you will join us in this room.’