by Anita Desai
Once he had outgrown his khaki school shorts and taken to fine white muslin shirts and pyjamas, he acquired sufficient self-confidence to join the circle of much older men on the lawn, and wisely sat listening rather than talking, saving up the talk for later when he would return home and tell Bim every detail, however casual or trivial, that glowed in his eyes with a special radiance related to everything that was Hyder Ali’s.
Having angered everyone in his own family by coming home very late one night, long after their dinner time, he lay awake on his cot in the garden and gave Bim a whispered account of the glories of a party at the Hyder Alis’.
‘There was a poet there tonight,’ he whispered, too tense with excitement to sleep. ‘A real poet, from Hyderabad, who is visiting them. He read out his poetry to us—it was wonderful—and Hyder Ali Sahib gave him a ring with a ruby in it.’
‘Was it that good?’ Bim murmured sleepily, exhausted by having waited up so late for Raja to come home and by Aunt Mira’s tearful laments about his bad ways.
‘Good—but I think I could write as good verse. And, you know, Hyder Ali Sahib asked me to recite, too.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yes, but not my own,’ he said regretfully. ‘They asked me to recite my favourite verses so I read them Iqbal’s,’ and he quoted to the uncomprehending Bim in proud, triumphant tones:
‘Thou didst create night but I made the lamp.
Thou didst create clay but I made the cup.
Thou didst create the deserts, mountains and forests,
I produced the orchards, gardens and groves.
It is I who made the glass out of stone
And it is I who turn a poison into an antidote.’
The words were absorbed by the dusty night garden so brimful of sleep and quiet as to seem crowded and to press upon them with its weight. Then Bim asked ironically ‘And did Hyder Ali Sahib give you a ring with a ruby in it too?’
Raja might have been offended if he had caught the irony in the low voice but all he heard were the voices of Hyder Ali’s guests as they praised his excellent diction, his perfect pronunciation. The poet from Hyderabad had fondled his shoulder, saying ‘He will go far, Hyder Ali Sahib. A mind that can appreciate Iqbal at such a tender age will surely go far.’ Entirely missing the sycophancy behind the words, the gesture, Raja had glowed almost as if he had written the verses himself. Even Bim and the dark garden could not dampen his glow.
But he was affronted when, seeing him write frenziedly all one afternoon that they were locked into the house because of a dust-storm raging outside, she had asked ‘Are you going to be an Urdu poet when you grow up, Raja?’
He felt that she ought to know that he was one already. But of course an ignorant younger sister could not see that. He gave her a bitter look through a haze of cigarette smoke. He had taken to smoking.
The summer his final school examination results came out, his parents were obliged to pay some attention to him. Raja would stand in their way as they went down the veranda steps to the car waiting to take them to the Roshonara Club for their daily game of bridge, or he would wait up for them in the veranda till they returned, late at night when the others were asleep.
‘Why are you still awake?’ his mother sighed disapprovingly as she drifted towards her bedroom, fatigued as always.
‘Father, I have to give in my application form for college. You have to sign.’
‘Give it to me,’ his father grunted through the disintegrating flakes of a moist cigar. Then, peering at the form in the dim light that came through the open front door, he frowned ‘But this is no college for you. It is a Jamia Millia form.’
‘That is where I want to study. I went there to get a form.’
‘You can’t study there,’ his father said, taking the cigar out of his mouth and spitting out a shred of tobacco. ‘It is a college for Muslim boys.’
‘No, anyone can go there who wants to specialise in Islamic studies.’
It was a phrase Raja liked to use. He had picked it up from Hyder Ali. It had impressed his sisters and his aunt. He gazed into his father’s face in the hope of similarly impressing him.
But his father’s face darkened by several shades and he stuttered in his curiously insipid and uninflected voice, ‘Specialise in Islamic studies? What are you talking about, you dunce?’
‘That is what I am going in for, father,’ Raja said steadily, somehow managing to imply his pride in his unusual choice, and his steadfastness, and his scorn for this vague old man who could not understand.
‘Rubbish,’ said his father flatly. ‘Bunkum,’ he said, using one of his favourite phrases, and tore the form in two before marching off to his room.
It was a stormy summer. Bim and Tara would chew their lips and exchange puzzled looks as they stood listening behind the curtains while father and son argued hotly whenever they met which was only occasionally and briefly so that all the arguments they built up inside themselves in silence burst out with great explosiveness on those few occasions. In the meantime, Raja grew more and more sullen and unpredictable in his temper while their father appeared to retreat deeper into the shadows off-stage where he existed unseen by his children. Finally, late one night when Raja forced him to sit down after his return from the club, not brush him aside as he walked past quickly, his father explained. Perhaps he had played a good game at the club. Perhaps he had enjoyed his dinner there. He was puffing at his cigar with an air of calm self-confidence as he talked.
‘If you had asked me a few years ago, I would have said yes at once: yes, all right.’
‘How could I ask a few years ago? I’ve only finished school this year, in April.’
‘I know, I know. I am not talking about you, about your school record.’ He waved his cigar so that the thick odour of tobacco swept through the closed room like a damp rag. ‘I’m talking about the political situation. Don’t you know anything about it? Don’t you know what a struggle is going on for Pakistan? How the Muslims are pressing the British to divide the country and give them half? There is going to be trouble, Raja—there are going to be riots and slaughter,’ he said, dropping his voice cautiously. ‘If you, a Hindu boy, are caught in Jamia Millia, the centre of Islamic studies—as you call it—you will be torn to bits, you will be burnt alive—’
‘Who will do that to me?’ asked Raja in astonishment, somewhat feigned for he knew of the political situation well enough from the evening gatherings in the Hyder Alis’ garden. The men there talked freely, forgetting the young boy’s presence, or his religion, and he listened, he was aware. Only he had never related such talk to his own plans or life. At that time he was still childish enough to consider it a kind of adults’ game in which he was not allowed to take part. He was somewhat flattered that his father, of all people, appeared to consider him adult enough now. He was flattered enough to listen attentively.
‘Who will do that to you? Muslims, for trying to join them when they don’t want you and don’t trust you, and Hindus, for deserting them and going over to the enemy. Hindus and Muslims alike will be out for your blood. It isn’t safe, Raja, it isn’t safe, son.’
Raja was thrilled by the idea and looked as bright-eyed as a child presented with a bright sword, but a thin, irritated voice whined from the bedroom ‘What is it you are telling the boy?’
‘Some facts,’ shouted the father, suddenly determined, suddenly decisive, ‘that he should know.’ He had seen Raja’s steadfastness waver and he jumped to take advantage: he was a practised bridge player.
Seeing this triumph, Raja shrunk visibly on the stool and became sullen again. He had not expected either quickness of response or reasoned opposition from the man who appeared to deal with both family and business by following a policy of neglect. Raja had known him only as someone leaving for the office or for the club, returning late and too tired for anything. He was startled by this unexpected aspect of his father, startled and put out.
His father saw his advantage with
the shrewd, watchful eye of the card-player, and went on expounding his theme to the boy—superfluously, no more was really needed. When his wife called again, he went in to pacify her but took up the matter with Raja again the next day and the next. Now it was Raja who retreated, who avoided him and tried to wriggle out of these confrontations by staying close to Aunt Mira and his sisters. They were all astonished by the way the father began to turn up in their midst while they were having a quietly domestic tea, or bickering over their homework, and began to address Raja as though he were not one of them but one of the adults, a person with whom adult affairs could be discussed. Raja was silent now. He had not expected this. He had certainly expected his father to oppose him, but ineffectually and non-verbally, merely with arrogance and silence. Raja was not really prepared to reason or debate with his father. He was carried away by ideas, on wings of imagination, not by reason or analysis. Recognising his father’s superior forces, he dispiritedly gave in and ceased to argue.
Their father’s visits to their part of the house ceased, too. Once again he went through the day without addressing a word to them on his way out of it or into it. They knew him only as the master of the entrance and the exit.
And then their mother, for the first time in twenty years, missed an evening at the club, said she did not feel well and would stay in bed. That night she passed quietly into a coma so that when her husband returned from the club after an unsatisfactory game with an unaccustomed partner, he found her lying still and flaccid on her bed, quite beyond questioning him on his game.
The ambulance came. The children stumbled out of their beds to watch her being carried out like a parcel containing some dangerous material that had to be carefully handled.
Next day, Tara, possessed by a childish memory of trailing after her mother along the rose walk on a summer morning, clamoured to be taken to see her, but a trembling Aunt Mira held her in her arms as if to protect her from something so unsuitable, and their father told them bluntly that she was unconscious and there was no point in their visiting her.
Instead of going to the club, he went to the hospital every evening now. The children sat on the veranda steps waiting for him to come home with some news. While they waited, they told stories, read, played games, and forgot. Only the whiff of hospital disinfectants and anaesthetics that clung to his clothes when he returned, reminded them that he had been to the hospital and not to the club. His face looked even gloomier than when he had played a bad game at the bridge table and, looking at it, they did not want to question him after all. Instead they turned instinctively to Aunt Mira who smiled with grotesque unnaturalness into their troubled faces and made them laugh by dropping things, forgetting others and stumbling about the house like a sad comedian.
Their mother died without seeing any of them again. If she ever, for a minute, regained consciousness, it was only to murmur the names of familiar cards that seemed to drift through her mind with a dying rustle.
Since they were not taken to her funeral, it was a little difficult for the children to remember always that she was not at the club, playing cards, but dead. The difference was not as large as friends and neighbours supposed it to be and the children, exchanging looks of mutual guilt when the neighbours came and wept a few tears required by custom and commiserated and tried to console, tacitly agreed to keep their guilt a secret. The secret replaced their mother’s presence in the house, a kind of ghostly surrogate which they never quite acknowledged and quite often forgot.
Raja went dispiritedly to Hindu College one day with one of the Misra boys summoned by his father to take him, since he was already a student of this college in Kashmere Gate picked by his father as suitable since he had studied there himself. When he came back, admission forms filled, subscriptions paid, a student enrolled in the English Literature course, he flung himself onto his bed and sulked for a week, refusing even to get up and go across to the Hyder Alis’ in the evenings although the Begum herself, hearing of their mother’s death, sent across a personal invitation.
‘Father’s gone to the club—get up, Raja. Come on. We’re playing Seven Tiles in the garden—won’t you play?’ coaxed Bim from the doorway. She was afraid that he was not only brooding over his defeat in the matter of the Jamia Millia but over their mother’s death, and could not bear the thought of his silent feelings.
He only snarled a reply and flung a book at her to drive her away. It was a little volume of Urdu poetry. Shocked, she bent to pick it up and dust it before quietly placing it on his bookshelf.
Raja started cycling to college with the Misra boys. This activity seemed to rouse him out of his sulks and, in spite of himself, he did begin to grow interested in college life and in his studies. He brought home volumes of Tennyson and Swinburne and lent them to Bim to read. No one in their family had studied literature before. Now she and Raja fell upon it with a kind of hunger, as if it were the missing element in their lives at last made available, and devoured it with an appetite, reading aloud to each other and memorising verses to quote aloud till Tara squirmed in misery and Aunt Mira’s jaw swung from its hinges in admiration.
But English literature, newly come upon and radiant in its freshness, was not the only gate opened to Raja now. His father had been a student of the college long ago; it had been very different in his time, and he had no idea how politically aware the students now were, what a hotbed it was for political fanaticism, and how many politicians and fanatics from outside had successfully infiltrated it. The quickly-aroused and enthusiastic Raja was drawn into this feverish atmosphere by curiosity and by an adolescent need for a cause. The boys there saw an easy recruit but had no inkling that Raja’s true and considered reaction to their fanatical Hindu beliefs would be one of outrage and opposition. They had not known, after all, about his admiration for Hyder Ali, for Urdu poetry, for the evening gatherings of poets and politicians in the garden. There was an immediate clash between them that roused each of them to greater, wilder enthusiasm for his particular cause. The atmosphere was so explosive, the air vibrated with threats and rumours of violence and enemity. Raja withdrew, began to be a bit cautious in what he said, assumed a cool air, watched, listened. He read mostly Lord Byron. Reading, he seemed to form a picture of himself, an image, that Bim, not his college acquaintances, was the first to recognise.
Bim remembered how, as small children, Raja had announced, so grandly, ‘When I grow up, I shall be a hero,’ making her instantly, with shining eyes, respond ‘And I will be a heroine,’ which had made Tara feel so miserable and excluded that she ran to Aunt Mira, whimpering ‘Bim and Raja say they will be a hero and heroine. They laugh when I say I will be a mother,’ and made Aunt Mira call the two of them for a scolding.
Bim remembered that when she heard Raja read aloud to her from Byron:
‘Place me on Sunium’s marbled steep,
Where nothing, save the waves and I,
May hear our mutual murmurs sweep:
There, swan-like, let me sing and die:
A land of slaves shall ne’er be mine:
Dash down yon cup of Samian wine.’
and tell her the story of Byron’s fight for Greek independence and his death in Greece as a hero and poet. ‘Like you,’ Bim murmured, making Raja stare hard at her to see if she were mocking. She gazed back at him innocently. Then he gave a slight curl of his lip as if he were pleased, and she was both perturbed and annoyed at herself. She did not like it and she later wondered if it had put ideas into his head—dangerous, heady ones about his heroism, his poetry. He must have let the boys in college know this somehow because Bim overheard the Misra boys call him ‘Lord Byron’ and, at times, simply ‘Lord’. It made her hot with anger and remorse at her own part in it.
Raja started going to the Hyder Alis’ for those evening gatherings again. Aunt Mira was perturbed. She had heard their father talk, she had heard talk amongst the servants and the neighbours, that worried her. Her lips closed about a thread she was sucking to a finen
ess so that it would enter a needle’s eye, she frowned and shook her head at him as he went leaping down the veranda steps and raced down the drive.
‘Why, Mira-masi?’ Bim asked, putting one hand on her knee, moved by her aunt’s expression.
Her aunt sat helplessly sucking the thread that dangled from her lips like a fine tail. As she put up her hand to remove it, her hand trembled. ‘He should not,’ she said in a kind of whimper. ‘It isn’t safe.’
‘They are our neighbours, Mira-masi’ Bim exclaimed in surprise.
‘But Muslims—it isn’t safe,’ her aunt whispered, trembling. ‘Oh, Bim,’ she said distractedly, ‘won’t you get me your father’s brandy bottle from the sideboard? A drop—just a drop in my tea—I do need it—it might help—it isn’t safe . . .’ And Bim, astonished and also tickled by the idea, rushed to fetch the bottle from the dark and richly odoriferous recesses of the great gloomy sideboard in the dining room and tipped it over her aunt’s tumbler of tea. ‘More, Mira-masi, more?’ she asked as the drops trickled in and Aunt Mira, pressing her fingers to her trembling lips, nodded: more, more, till the tumbler was full and then she seized it and drank it, watched open-mouthedly by her nieces. They heard the tumbler chatter against her false teeth and laughed. But ‘No, it isn’t safe,’ she repeated with a hiccup, lowering the tumbler to the tea tray with a nervous clatter. ‘Run and put the bottle back, Bim—it’s not safe.’
