Two Short Novels (5 page)

‘Yes, brother,’ Nur said and then, sensing the reason for Gama’s hesitation, added, ‘The unattainable seems great. But if you are poor you can’t get anywhere; if you can’t keep pace with the fashions invented by the rich students, they dub you mean and cut you.
Achha
,
there couldn’t be any worse snobbery in the world than that of the . . . .’ And he impatiently twisted his face as if the very thought of poverty evoked in him a kind of disgust, and there was the knowledge of all the little pinpricks and humiliations to his self-respect that he had suffered because he was a confectioner’s son.

For a moment he lay confused. Then he felt his temples throb with the fretting and he tried to calm himself by looking away. His eyes stared at the dilapidated ceiling where the cobwebs hung to their nets among the thick coils of soot, and his face seemed to become enchantingly childlike, as if it had never suffered the pang of a sigh.

‘It was a lucky escape from the prison of that school where I had always been afraid of being beaten,’ he said smiling. ‘Nobody could beat you at college and the professors treated everyone as gentlemen. And in a way it was as Azad might have said,

‘A golden summer during which I plucked the blossoms from the orchards of many colourful nights and days
. . .
’

‘Oh, you mean Azad, the Teddy Sahib, who was your friend, the son of the Health Officer who went mad because he failed to become a deputy collector. Or do you mean the poet, Maulana Muhammad Husein Azad?’ Gama asked with a slight trace of mockery in his voice.

‘I mean Teddy,’ Nur said wistfully. ‘Isn’t it terrible that he should go off his head? He was a marvel, you know.’

‘He must have been, that’s why he went mad, I suppose,’ said Gama with a trace of malice. He had been jealous of Nur’s friendship with Azad.

‘No, really, Gamian,’ Nur said, rising excitedly to the defence of his friend, ‘he was the only friend I made at college, and he was really wonderful. He was driven to madness by people and our kind of bullock’s life.’ He opened his mouth to say something loudly, but thought better of it and sank back, coughing, biting his lips and churning the froth in his mouth.

Gama rubbed his chest slowly, soothingly and contemplated his face, rather frightened. But Nur opened his eyes, breathed a few deep breaths and smiling, lay still for a moment and said: ‘Since the last few days, I have been getting these choking breaths. Yesterday my breathing was better, but I don’t know why I am gasping this morning.’

‘You must not worry about anyone,’ Gama said, ‘You must lie still.’

‘I am all right,’ Nur said slowly. ‘And really I must tell you about poor Azad. You never liked him, you see, you didn’t meet him. He was really maddened by our kind of existence. I remember that the first time I saw him come up to college, dressed in his khaki shirt, shorts, and khaki polo topee, an impetuous little fellow, on a rusty old bicycle, I thought the same as you. But the older boys were making fun of the first year fools and they hid Azad’s bicycle and his hat when he went to see the Principal. And when he came out they ragged him by making rude noises as he looked for his belongings. He could see it in their eyes that they had hidden the things and he asked them smilingly to give them to him. But they refused to own up and just mocked. You
would have been sorry for him if you had been there and you would have admired what he did. He challenged them all and fell upon them. I have never seen anything like it — the glint in his eyes when the boys became indecent. He leapt upon them with a quivering face. I knew that none of them would dare to attack me because of you, and I rescued him and showed him where his hat and bicycle were. It was because of that that we became friends and not as people maliciously said later that we had formed a “conspiracy of beloveds”. He was a very affectionate person.’

Gama bent his head with the silent shame of a memory of
a year ago when he himself had mocked at Azad, crying out in the bazaar,
‘
Hai
Babu
ji
,’
with a rude simulation of the tone of a lover sighing for his beloved.

‘He was fond of making speeches,’ Nur said, remembering an evening when Azad had lifted him out of his loneliness by his speech when he won the Ruchi Ram Sahni Declamation Prize, remembering the very colour, and the ring of
those words of Azad’s, when with a face transfigured with eagerness he had summed up the universe.

‘ “The whole world is in search of happiness,” he used to say,’ Nur began.

‘What then?’ Gama asked.

Nur paused embarrassedly on the edge of the words as they rang in his ears across the space of six years. He didn’t want to repeat them, as they might easily lend themselves to
Gama’s mockery, and yet he couldn’t restrain himself.

‘The whole world is in search of happiness,’ he repeated, loudly, though he knew for certain from the light in Gama’s eyes that if he would not mock, he would certainly not be able to understand the whole meaning of
those words. ‘The whole world is in search of happiness, all mankind seeks the privileges of glory and power and wealth. But it is vulgar, I tell you, it is vulgar and stupid, the way in which society distributes her favours. The bitch has no morals. She yields herself to the embraces of any robber, brigand or cheating idiot who has secured for himself the traditional right to a vested interest. And these conscienceless swines have forgotten death, the cancer which grows slowly and surely within them, the cancer of their own decay, the germ of their own decay that they bear within them; and they shall be annihilated long before they have earned their pensions or retired to enjoy their ill-gotten
gains
. . .
’

Nur paused to look at Gama and to see if he were listening to the words. Gama’s attention was drifting but Nur went on nevertheless as if he were talking aloud to himself.

‘ “But death comes to everyone, you will say, gentlemen,” he had himself posed the question and then burst out with that querulous impatience which characterised him: “Yes, yes, death comes to everyone, but there are two ways of avoiding it. Some form silent conspiracy to forget it; they are the imbeciles who build on graft and extortion and cunning and sheer might and so blacken their souls in the struggle for self-aggrandisement that they daren’t enjoy the gains of their perfidy, and who therefore combine holiness with business like our
Lallas
,
and talk of the things of the spirit even as they pass the hand of satisfaction over their bellies. And then, there are the men who are willing to accept a share in the total gain of the struggle for existence of the community, who want to organise the fight against nature, and who, though afraid of death, seek to conquer it
. . . .
They will
. . . .
” I don’t remember the rest,’ Nur said faltering and flushed but exhilarated as if his soul was dancing to the sound of that rhetoric with a recklessness which frightened him.

‘You have said the truth, “Why did you drag me in the dust by making me an M.A.” ’ said Gama quoting the beginning of Nur’s poem against Azad.

‘But really, really, believe me,’ said Nur, ‘I know he went mad because the torn and battered soul of India was struggling inside him, because he seemed to have understood the hopelessness of our lot. Really, he knew and suffered. We used to talk during our long walks, and it is curious that we felt we knew what was wrong with India and with ourselves, but couldn’t do anything, and only sank deeper and deeper into despair. I must say I owe him a great deal
. . .
’

‘Your illness, for instance,’ said Gama.

‘No, really,’ protested Nur. ‘It may be that he awakened me to the misery of our condition and made me suffer, but he also released all the stifled impulses I had never suspected in myself before.’ And he was going to say that Azad had made him talk as he had never talked before, laugh, weep, read, think, feel, do things, live and breathe to a new rhythm, that he had broken all the barriers of self-consciousness that separated him, the confectioner’s son, from everyone else, but he felt he was being naive and Gama was antagonistic. And yet he couldn’t restrain himself from resuscitating the truth about Azad in an attempt to obliterate Gama’s prejudice: ‘He initiated me into the mysteries of poetry and philosophy,’ he continued, sweating in the warm glare of the sun that burnt hotly outside now. ‘It was really the way he talked. The passion, for instance, which he put into the reading of books, suiting his intonation to the slow gradation of Heine’s love poems, to the lyrics of Goethe and Iqbal, to the broad histrionic gesture of Mercutio in
Romeo and Juliet
,
to the comic overtones of Dickens and the polished undertones of Flaubert, all names to you, as they were to me, because the only literature I had known was the
High-roads of History
and Southey’s
Life of Nelson
which I had read for the Matric,
Rawlinson’s
Selection of Essays
and selections from Boswell’s
Life of Johnson
which were the texts for the first and second year at college, and the cribs and questions and answers by Sheikh Abdul Qadir . . . I
don’t know where he got to know all these things.’

‘Perhaps he didn’t know them at all and it was really the way he talked,’ said Gama laughing.

‘No,’ Nur said, ‘he spent most of his time in odd corners of the college, while all of us just wasted our time ragging each other and gossiping as we sat in the fields outside the college buildings during the free hours. You see, the boys who passed out from our school, especially Sarjit and Mathra, formed a group and they resented my friendship with Azad. But when I went and sat with Sarjit and company they only talked scandal about which boy was in love with whom, and what Professor had an alliance with which boy, and whether so and so shouldn’t be ragged if he came that way, and what time they would get to the club, for tennis and ping-pong. One day I decided to break away from that crowd and joined Azad who was sitting writing poetry in the dome of the college. And he opened my eyes to realities.’

‘Childling, you are easily led astray,’ said Gama, out of a clash of kindness for Nur, a contempt for Azad and a sense of inferiority. ‘All those speeches of his are no use. We want a worker’s raj just as it is prevailing in Russia, because the condition here will be as it is in Russia. There was a time when the Czar ruled Russia as the Badshah of Vilayat rules us. But one day he was shot down. And the peasants and labourers are ruling there. I have joined a tonga-wallahs’
branch of the Labour Federation. The labourers of Hindustan are realising that the Sarkar can’t go on.’

‘
Ohe bachu
,
you will be put into prison,’ Nur said, laughing but earnest.

‘I don’t care for the limp lord,’ said Gama with a swagger. But then he smiled embarrassedly as if he were not sure of himself.

Nur looked at a feather dropping from the top of a house across the shadow which cut the fierce sun outside, and he saw the shimmering of an azure and scarlet and yellow spectrum of light before him as he had often done lying in this bed. He felt the monotony of his existence and the ceaseless discomfort which his body had endured through the burning sun. The only high spots had been those baths in the canal with Azad when they were at college, or the times when they had lifted their heads towards the clotted greenery of the city gardens, especially when they had worked together for their finals. Otherwise, one commonplace day had followed another, the oppressive daylight sucking the strength out of one’s bones and leaving one weak and tired and uninterested. It was perhaps the heat which made him so apathetic now. ‘But it is no use thinking of that,’ he said to himself, ‘it only makes me impatient.’ And he turned to Gama, though he knew that the lengthy conversation was straining him.

‘Have you heard how Azad is now?’ he asked. ‘And is he still in the asylum or has he been brought back to his father’s house?’

‘They say he was brought back from the asylum,’ answered Gama, ‘but he became violent again, raved profanities and obscenities and went on a hunger strike like Gandhi, demanding the release not only of all political prisoners but of all lunatics.’

‘You are joking,’ Nur said, ‘I suppose the Government brought influence to bear on his father. If only he hadn’t been such a fool, airing his opinions when even the boldest spirits spoke in guarded undertones, but he was always so impetuous.’ And he thought of the fiery, fanatical figure, at times like a sword that was never sheathed and destroyed everything in its way, and at others, loose and reckless, with a hearty laugh that made the world seem like a coloured bubble through its drumming thunders, and plunged one into a welter of confusion. Such a person, maddened by the life that surrounded him. Why didn’t he go on writing poetry? Why did he have to go into politics? But what self-respecting person in India could help being political; who could help being affected by the sordid side of this tragic existence? He himself had kept his mouth shut but what had he got? Why, he had known as he left college that death lurked for him at the bend of the road.

‘What are you thinking?’ Gama asked, turning uncomfortably to prepare for his departure.

‘Only these memories of our past,’ Nur said wearily.

‘But why do you feel like that this morning?’ Gama said. ‘You are as peevish as a stubborn child. Come, have a heart. You will be all right.’

‘My father wanted me to apply for admission to all the Government services,’ said Nur in an even, cynical voice, ‘to all the Government services, one after another, believing that since I had got a degree I had a free ticket for admission into the paradise of officialdom. And, in anticipation of my future position as a dignified member of the Government of India, he married me off. You should have seen the bustle and uproar in this house, the raucous laughter of the women of the gulley as they sang filthy songs on the top of the house
. . . .
And the crowds of guests gorging on the sweets, which the Chaudhri made, as they had never gorged before
. . . .
You should have seen their paunches expand with the free food — and the paunch of Maulvi Shahab Din knew no bounds. The noise and the din amid the sweating bodies left no room for one to stand or sit and it was sheer bedlam till the day when they led two sheep to be martyred before the divines and the witnesses. And I nearly died of shame to think what my college friends would feel. But of course, I had to go through the absurd ritual for fear that the Chaudhri would lose his temper in public.

‘That poor, silly girl, Iqbal, was as much a pawn in the game which her father was playing with mine as I was in the game which my father was playing with her’s: her father thought that I would get into the Imperial Service with my first class degree, and my father thought that the daughter of a respectable veterinary surgeon would bring a good dowry. And both the players were deceived in deceiving each other. I could not get into the Imperial Service and she only brought the prestige of her father’s position, and her own self, for the dowry. But no one realised this until after I returned from the interview with the board which was to select candidates for the Imperial Forest Service.