Two Short Novels (6 page)

‘I never told you of this but, through the confusion of hope and fear I spent myself like a fool, arranging the details of a plan to hide my origin because that was the only obstacle to my selection since I had passed well from the University. It was very funny
. . .
I could laugh at it now. I borrowed a suit from Azad and a brown, trilby hat, as the Chaudhri wouldn’t believe that it was necessary to buy me a Sahib’s rigout such as could compete with the Ranken and Company suits of the other candidates; the Chaudhri didn’t see why a suit was necessary at all since I was an M.A. Pass. But, of course, he didn’t know that jobs are given by the Public Service Commission for smartness, general appearance, the possession of a good pedigree and according to the number of testimonials and recommendations from influential persons that a man may have, more than for anything else. You should have seen me doing a dress rehearsal before going to Simla.’

‘You must have looked like a Sahib
,
with your fair complexion,’ commented Gama with admiration.

‘Yes, I must confess,’ said Nur flushing with fatigue and excitement, though his voice was still tuned to a smooth cynicism, ‘for once I liked myself, whereas otherwise I had always been embarrassed by the number of lovers who made my life difficult at school and college. But the shame of knowing that I was the son of a confectioner, if I am to be honest, lessened the thrill of my own perfection. I never looked at my face in the glass afterwards without casting my eyes on my feet also immediately, like the peacock who weeps to see its ugly paws, and so I went. The journey to Simla — oh, I shall never forget that journey to Simla — I suppose it was the best thing I got out of it all. And the hotel, though since I knew that the Chaudhri had borrowed the hundred rupees for my expenses I couldn’t enjoy the
Angrezi
food they gave us at the Hotel Bristol. And then the interview . . . . The fear almost gave me dysentery.’

He paused, laughed nervously and reddened, then paled with shame.

‘Go on,’ Gama said impatiently. ‘Tell me about that. Did you see the
Lat
Sahib?’

‘Long before I saw the
Lat
Sahib
,
there were those sons of the
Lats
who were appearing before the board. You can’t imagine the feeling I had when I entered the waiting room at Barnes Court, the office of the Governor of the Punjab: there were thirty other candidates, all splendidly dressed in expensive suits, all obviously the sons of the richest of fathers. And I had to make a terrible effort in my own mind not to betray my feelings during that long ord
eal.’

He stopped short suddenly as if he felt suffocated with the lack of air in the low-ceilinged room and he moved his legs about as if he wanted to jump out of bed, and escape into the open.

‘Then what happened?’ asked Gama who had never been inside an Englishman’s house or talked to a European, except that he had been caned by Mercado, the Head Master of the Islamia School.

‘Oh, nothing very much,’ said Nur, his face twisting with a wry smile as if he were writhing with impatience inside and yet making a desperate effort to spit it out now that he had begun to vomit out his suffering. ‘The dramatic entry of me, in a complete funk, into the room where the commission sat, under the guidance of a peon in a goldbraided redcoat, who not only looked like a Rajah but behaved insolently like one; the seriousness of that moment, in which tables, curtains, papers, pens and an assortment of the
Lat
Sahib’s pipes swam in the void before my eyes with the glorious polished air of perfection surrounding them and, of course, as if it just had to happen at that auspicious moment, the foolish blunder on my part in kicking a chair over and saying “Good Noon,” when I should have said, “Good Morning”
. . .
’

He blushed with embarrassment at telling Gama the story of his folly and exposing himself in the most sensitive, vulnerable parts of his character, and he lingered on the tremulous chords of that tense moment when his greeting was returned and when fear had taken possession of his body and set it trembling.

‘You know, that man Bailey was the son of a swine,’ he continued, after a little hesitation. ‘He was so alert in observation, one of those Englishmen who know us better than we know ourselves. My life went out of me as I saw his lean, wily face, lined on the cheeks as if he had been sucked up like an orange by that cow of a wife of his. I couldn’t understand the first question he asked me because the soft tone of his measured speech seemed to me to be issuing from the steady stare of his eyes rather than from his mouth. I don’t think his colleagues understood the burr-burr of his thin lips either, as they sat round him like statues; the buffalo-faced Raja Ram Singh, the parrot-nosed Abdul Hamid Khan, and that lover of his mother, the Parsi, Sir Fredoonji. I could have laughed had I not been terror-stricken by the
Lat
Sahib
,
the long-necked pelican. I have never known the eternities of hell in this life as in those moments
. . .
’

He stopped again and drowsed through a suffering in which the present was interweaving with the past. And, for a moment, he listened to his heart drumming like a tom-tom in a monotonous rhythm.

‘We ought to beat them with our shoes soaked in water, these illegally begotten, the limp lords as well as their sycophants!’ said Gama, whose hooliganism had become the desperate sincerity of political passion roused by the struggle in the dust, the straw, the dung, the urine of the underworld in which he lived.

‘Oh, what is the use?’ Nur said as he turned his face away, tired and worn and grey, as if he were a creature from another world, a pale traveller from some distant country, who had a story to tell which he thought wouldn’t be understood by any man of this land, and who was yet impelled by a curious instinct to unburden himself as if he would talk himself out of his frustration.

‘Abdul Hamid Khan is a fanatical Muslim Leaguer, isn’t he?’ Gama asked.

‘But I had known from the very beginning that I wouldn’t be accepted,’ Nur said in a hopeless, low voice, and stopped for a moment to consider how to convey his humiliation so as not to be unkind to himself and to expose his judges the more cruelly in order to revenge himself upon them. ‘When Raja Ram Singh asked me whether I had taken part in any “extramural” activity at college, I was so surprised at the buffalo-face mouthing a difficult word that I knew he had looked at the dictionary before coming there. And, frankly, I didn’t know the meaning of the word myself, though I tried to make a vague guess and answered I had played tennis. And Abdul Hamid Khan’s sympathy for his Mohammedan co-religionists refused to appear. Instead, the pig-eater laughed when Fredoonji asked me if my father was a confectioner, and I said: “Oh, no sir, he is the Chaudhri of the bazaar.” And so I walked away from the house of the limp lord! And as the poet has said: “I came out of your lane very insulted and humiliated.” ’

He had a stale taste at the root of his palate as he ended on that note and clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth to take away the dryness that the profusion of speech had produced. And he became conscious of the incommunicability of his feelings to Gama or to anybody, through the impatience that possessed him.

But even as he relaxed, his bitterness returned. Only this time instead of bursting out, he simulated the air of stretching his limbs and twisted about on the bed as if to exercise the fatigue that possessed him.

‘You are very restless,’ said Gama. ‘Are your limbs tired? May I press your legs?’

‘No, I feel slightly cold,’ Nur said.

‘I must be going now,’ Gama suddenly said, listening to the air. ‘Someone is coming up the stairs.’

‘Nur, Nur, my son,’ a heavy hoarse voice came with the puffing and panting of hosts of other women, and after a long moment, the short, square form of his mother-in-law emerged, shrouded in her flowing white cotton veil, followed by the shrouded ghosts of his wife and her aunt.

‘
Hai, hai
,’
they cried as they advanced, ‘here is a man.’ And dropping the thick shrouds they had lifted to get a view of Nur, they rushed like fluttering, frightened hens towards a corner of the room.

Thereupon Gama turned and without looking this side or that, rushed away, down the stairs, lest the modesty of the women be outraged by the penetration of his glance.

‘
Ohe
Gamian!’ Nur shouted, jumping from his bed till his skeleton bent over his ribs,
‘
Ohe
. . . .
’
And then, realising that his friend was out of hearing he coughed with the strain of the effort as if every sinew and fibre of his skin were snapping with the black cough which tugged at his tissues, and tore the very protoplasm of his life. He hung his head down and bit his lips and resigned himself to the tides of the cough that lashed his inside, till the convulsive spasms subsided into gasps of hiccupping breaths and, bringing tears to his eyes, reddening his face a vivid red, threw up thick globules of blood and saliva like a string of tattered rags.

‘Oh! my mother, oh! my mother,’ he moaned through the acrid droolings of his pain, and bending over the spittoon to throw off the last streaks of saliva in his mouth strained his neck to breathe.

‘Hai, hai! Hai, hai!’
the two elderly women shrieked rushing towards him like vultures to their prey and wailed, ‘What will happen to us, what will happen to our Iqbal?’ while his girl wife stood at the foot of the bed, unhooded and helpless, with tears in her eyes.

Nur lay back with his eyes closed.

‘Hai, hai!, Hai, hai!’
his mother-in-law and her sister cried the more loudly, and beating their breasts, howled and moaned till the old Grandma came slowly down the stairs and the women of the neighbouring houses rushed to the windows of their houses and began to shout, ‘Is he dead? Is he dead?’

Nur was oppressed by the hysterical women, embarrassed and exasperated by the way they had lighted upon him when he was talking to
Gama and broken the spell of his indignation against the world, which was forcing out of him the truths that he had felt but never expressed, which was making him recognise the necessity to
tell life what he thought of it, now that he was to
be deprived of it.

The women’s wails grew louder and shriller as his grandmother, his stepmother and the other women of the lane joined the chorus, the loudest of them adding to
their shrieks a violent show of beating their breasts and smiting their foreheads in a rhythmic sequence attuned to
the dirge of
Hai, hai! Hai, hai! Hai, hai!

Nur hardened his jaws, stiffened his body, and rose as if he were a brittle sword which wanted to hack their sprawling forms. But even as he lifted his head, he realised the futility of his rage against them as they were only practising a stupid convention that ordained the invocation of cries and shrieks and howls at the barest sign of death. He merely opened his eyes and waved his arm and said: ‘I am not dead, I am not dead,’ and collapsed in a heap.

‘Be quiet, mother! Be quiet, auntie! Be quiet, grandma!’ his wife was saying, as she struggled to stop them beating their breasts.

Nur looked at her. She seemed so helpless and shy that he felt sick to think he had ever hated her, she seemed so touching in her stupidity that he wished he could touch her now and make a contact which he had refused to establish between himself and her ever since they had been married, except in the moments of lust when she had docilely opened her legs to him.

‘Come mother, come auntie, come grandma, let him rest, come,’ she was whispering, as she dragged them away one by one. And she seemed to him tenderer than ever, someone who had hidden the light of her affection and her love in her own distress always, someone who had suffered and yet never shown it by word or deed. He suddenly recalled that he had cruelly and deliberately detached himself from her, because she was restrained by the convention of purdah
,
because she wasn’t a fashionable woman who could put on a sari and walk out with him so that he could proudly show her off to the world as his wife, and he was full of remorse. For, during the days of his suffering, the dull, hot days which followed his degradation at the hands of the selection committee of the Imperial Forest Service, when he had walked the dusty roads from one Government office to another, in midsummer heat, and was insulted by the peons who refused to let him see officials because he couldn’t pay them gratuities, she had followed him about tenderly, pathetically, fetching him cool drinks and fanning him, pressing his head, rubbing his feet, soothing him as he sought to forget the weariness of his struggle for a job in an afternoon’s sleep. And he had kicked her in the chagrin of his disappointments when, one day, during the period when he wrote a hundred applications and trudged a thousand weary miles to secure recommendations, during the days when he was weeping over the sneers of his relatives and the whispered mockery of the neighbours, she had yielded to him the perplexing knowledge of her pregnancy. And even then she had followed him about, like a devoted dog, worshipping him with her eyes, while he, in the panic of the fear of fatherhood that hung like an extra load on his already heavy-laden head, had frowned at her, refused to talk to her, and ignored her utterly, only charging at her now and then with the deliberate, violent, hard thrusts of a diabolical passion, as if he wanted to revenge himself against her
. . .
and leave her high and dry in the writhings of dissatisfaction without a word or a gesture of consolation. And when she had proudly presented him with the gift of a little red-faced girl child who frowned and cried with closed eyes, he had felt like murdering her and the child and had gone out reading among the tall valerians of the city garden, its towers and its lawns.