'Who's that ? Who's that ? Is it Maan ?' came his father's angry voice.
'Yes, Baoji,' said Maan, and continued to walk up the stairs.
'Did you hear me?' called his father in a voice that reverberated across half of Prem Nivas.
'Yes, Baoji,' Maan stopped.
'Then come down here at once.'
'Yes, Baoji.' Maan stumbled down the stairs and into his father's office. He sat down on the chair across the small table at which his father was sitting. There was no one in the office besides the two of them and a couple of lizards that kept scurrying across the ceiling throughout their conversation.
'Stand up. Did I tell you to sit down ?'
Maan tried to stand up, but failed. Then he tried again, and leaned across the table towards his father. His eyes were glazed. The papers on the table and the glass of water near his father's hand seemed to frighten him.
Mahesh Kapoor stood up, his mouth set in a tight line, his eyes stern. He had a file in his right hand, which he slowly transferred to his left. He was about to slap Maan hard across the face when Mrs Mahesh Kapoor rushed in and said :
'Don't - don't - don't do that-'
Her voice and eyes pleaded with her husband, and he relented. Maan, meanwhile, closed his eyes and collapsed back into the chair. He began to drift off to sleep.
His father, enraged, came around the table, and started shaking him as if he wanted to jolt every bone in his body.
'Baoji!' said Maan, awoken by the sensation, and began to laugh.
His father raised his right arm again, and with the back of his hand slapped his twenty-five-year-old son across the face. Maan gasped, stared at his father, and raised his hand to touch his cheek.
478Mrs Mahesh Kapoor sat down on one of the benches that ran along the wall. She was crying.
'Now you listen, Maan, unless you want another of those - listen to me,' said his father, even more furious now that his wife was crying because of something he had done. 'I don't care how much of this you remember tomorrow morning but I am not going to wait until you are sober. Do you understand ?' He raised his voice and repeated, 'Do you understand ?'
Maan nodded his head, suppressing his first instinct, which was to close his eyes again. He was so sleepy that he could only hear a few words drifting in and out of his consciousness. Somewhere, it seemed to him, there was a sort of tingling pain. But whose ?
'Have you seen yourself? Can you imagine how you look ? Your hair wild, your eyes glazed, your pockets hanging out, a whisky stain all the way down your kurta -'
Maan shook his head, then let it droop gently on his chest. All he wanted to do was to cut off what was going on outside his head: this angry face, this shouting, this tingling.
He yawned.
Mahesh Kapoor picked up the glass and threw the water on Maan's face. Some of it fell on his own papers but he didn't even look down at them. Maan coughed and choked and sat up with a start. His mother covered her eyes with her hands and sobbed.
'What did you do with the money? What did you do with it ?' asked Mahesh Kapoor.
'What money ?' asked Maan, watching the water drip down the front of his kurta, one channel taking the route of his whisky stain.
'The business money.'
Maan shrugged, and frowned in concentration.
'And the spending money I gave you ?' continued his father threateningly.
Maan frowned in deeper concentration, and shrugged again.
'What did you do with it ? I'll tell you what you did with
479it - you spent it on that whore.' Mahesh Kapoor would never have referred to Saeeda Bai in such terms if he had not been driven beyond the limit of restraint.
Mrs Mahesh Kapoor put her hands to her ears. Her husband snorted. She was behaving, he thought impatiently, like all three of Gandhiji's monkeys rolled into one. She would be clapping her hands over her mouth next.
Maan looked at his father, thought for a second, then said, 'No. I only brought her small presents. She never
asked for anything more ' He was wondering to himself
where the money could have gone.
'Then you must have drunk and gambled it away,' said his father in disgust.
Ah yes, that was it, recalled Maan, relieved. Aloud he said, in a pleased tone, as if an intractable problem had, after long endeavour, suddenly been solved :
'Yes, that is it, Baoji. Drunk - gambled - gone.' Then the implications of this last word struck him, and he looked shamefaced.
'Shameless - shameless - you are behaving worse than a depraved zamindar, and I will not have it,' cried Mahesh Kapoor. He thumped the pink file in front of him. 'I will not have it, and I will not have you here any longer. Get out of town, get out of Brahmpur. Get out at once. I will not have you here. You are ruining your mother's peace of mind, and your own life, and my political career, and our family reputation. I give you money, and what do you do with it ? - you gamble with it or spend it on whores or on whisky. Is debauchery your only skill ? I never thought I would be ashamed of a son of mine. If you want to see someone with real hardships look at your brother-in-law he never asks for money for his business, let alone “for this and for that”. And what of your fiancée? We find a suitable girl from a good family, we arrange a good match for you - and then you chase after Saeeda Bai, whose life and history are an open book.'
'But I love her,' said Maan.
'Love ?' cried his father, his incredulity mixed with rage. 'Go to bed at once. This is your last night in this house. I
480want you out by tomorrow. Get out! Go to Banaras or wherever you choose, but get out of Brahmpur. Out!'
Mrs Mahesh Kapoor begged her husband to rescind this drastic command, but to no avail. Maan looked at the two geckos on the ceiling as they scurried about to and fro. Then - suddenly - he got up with great resolution and without assistance, and said:
'All right. Goodnight! Goodnight! Goodnight! I'll go! I'll leave this house tomorrow.'
And he went off to bed without help, even remembering to take off his shoes before he fell off to sleep.
6.24
THE next morning he woke up with a dreadful headache, which, however, cleared up miraculously in a couple of hours. He remembered that his father and he had exchanged words, and waited till the Minister of Revenue had gone to the Assembly before he went to ask his mother what it was they had said to each other. Mrs Mahesh Kapoor was at her wits' end: her husband had been so incensed last night that he hadn't slept for hours. Nor had he been able to work, and this had incensed him further. Any suggestion of reconciliation from her had met with an almost incoherently angry rebuke from him. She realized that he was quite serious, that Maan would have to leave. Hugging her son to her she said :
'Go back to Banaras, work hard, behave responsibly, win back your father's heart.'
None of these four clauses appealed particularly to Maan, but he assured his mother that he would not cause trouble at Prem Nivas any longer. He ordered a servant to pack his things. He decided that he would go and stay with Firoz; or, failing that, with Pran; or, failing that, with the Rajkumar and his friends; or, failing that, somewhere else in Brahmpur. He would not leave this beautiful city or forgo the chance to meet the woman he loved because his disapproving, desiccated father told him so.
481'Shall I get your father's PA to arrange your ticket to Banaras ?' asked Mrs Mahesh Kapoor.
'No. If I need to, I'll do that at the station.'
After shaving and bathing he donned a crisp white kurta-pyjama and made his way a little shamefacedly towards Saeeda Bai's house. If he had been as drunk as his mother seemed to think he had been, he supposed that he must have been equally so outside Saeeda Bai's gate, where he had a vague sense of having gone.
He arrived at Saeeda Bai's house. He was admitted. Apparently, he was expected.
On the way up the stairs, he glanced at himself in the mirror. Unlike before, he now looked at himself quite critically. A white, embroidered cap covered his head; he took it off and surveyed his prematurely balding temples before putting it on again, thinking ruefully that perhaps it was his baldness that Saeeda Bai did not like. 'But what can I do about it ?' he thought.
When she heard his step on the corridor, Saeeda Bai called out in a welcoming voice, 'Come in, come in, Dagh Sahib. Your footsteps sound regular today. Let us hope that your heart is beating as regularly.'
Saeeda Bai had slept over the question of Maan and had concluded that something had to be done. Though she had to admit to herself that he was good for her, he was getting to be too demanding of her time and energy, too obsessively attached, for her to handle easily.
When Maan told her about his scene with his father, and that he had been thrown out of the house, she was very upset. Prem Nivas, where she sang regularly at Holi and had once sung at Dussehra, had become a regular fixture of her annual calendar. She had to consider the question of her income. Equally importantly, she did not want her young friend to remain in trouble with his father. 'Where do you plan to go ?' she asked him.
'Why, nowhere!' exclaimed Maan. 'My father has delusions of grandeur. He thinks that because he can strip a million landlords of their inheritance, he can equally easily order his son about. I am going to stay in Brahmpur - withfriends.' A sudden thought struck him. 'Why not here ?' he asked.
'Toba, toba!' cried Saeeda Bai, putting her hands to her shocked ears.
'Why should I be separated from you ? From the town where you live ?' He leaned towards her and began to embrace her. 'And your cook makes such delicious shami kababs,' he added.
Saeeda Bai might have been pleased by Maan's ardour, but she was thinking hard. 'I know,' she said, disengaging herself. 'I know what you must do.'
'Mmh,' said Maan, attempting to engage himself again.
'Do sit still and listen, Dagh Sahib,' said Saeeda Bai in a coquettish voice. 'You want to be close to me, to understand me, don't you ?'
'Yes, yes, of course.'
'Why, Dagh Sahib ?'
'Why ?' asked Maan incredulously.
'Why ?' persisted Saeeda Bai.
'Because I love you.'
'What is love - this ill-natured thing that makes enemies even of friends ?'
This was too much for Maan, who was in no mood to get involved in abstract speculations. A sudden, horrible thought struck him : 'Do you want me to go as well ?'
Saeeda Bai was silent, then she tugged her sari, which had slipped down slightly, back over her head. Her kohlblackened eyes seemed to look into Maan's very soul.
'Dagh Sahib, Dagh Sahib!' she rebuked him.
Maan was instantly repentant, and hung his head. 'I just feared that you might want to test our love by distance,' he said.
'That would cause me as much pain as you,' she told him sadly. 'But what I was thinking was quite different.'
She was silent, then played a few notes on the harmonium and said:
'Your Urdu teacher, Rasheed, is leaving for his village in a few days. He will be gone for a month. I don't know how to arrange for an Arabic teacher for Tasneem or an
483Urdu teacher for you in his absence. And I feel that in order to understand me truly, to appreciate my art, to resonate to my passion, you must learn my language, the language of the poetry I recite, the ghazals I sing, the very thoughts I think.'
'Yes, yes,' whispered Maan, enraptured.
'So you must go to the village with your Urdu teacher for a while - for a month.'
'What?' cried Maan, who felt that another glass of water had been flung in his face.
Saeeda Bai was apparently so upset by her own solution to the problem - it was the obvious solution, she murmured, biting her lower lip sadly, but she did not know how she could bear being separated from him, etc. - that in a few minutes it was Maan who was consoling her rather than she him. It was the only way out of the problem, he assured her : even if he had nowhere to live in the village, he would sleep in the open, he would speak think - write - the language of her soul, he would send her letters written in the Urdu of an angel. Even his father would be proud of him.
'You have made me see that there is no other way,' said Saeeda Bai at length, letting herself be convinced gradually.
Maan noticed that the parakeet, who was in the room with them, was giving him a cynical look. He frowned.
'When is Rasheed leaving ?'
'Tomorrow.'
Maan went pale. 'But that only leaves tonight!' he cried, his heart sinking. His courage failed him. 'No - I can't go - I can't leave you.'