No God in Sight (8 page)

‘You want to be a politician or something?’ I had asked Nawaz. ‘What’s with the sherwani and skullcap?’ He didn’t answer, just stood quietly waiting for the paans.

On the first day I refused to sell him any. ‘Son,’ I said to Nawaz, ‘I can do without your business. The people I sell this stuff to deserve it. They are rotten. But not you. Better stay away from all this paan-vaan.’ But Nawaz would have none of it, and threatened to buy the paans elsewhere.

I may be scrupulous, but I too have to survive, don’t I?

‘More kattha, Badru!’ Nawaz said. ‘Lots more kattha. I want my mouth to be red like a pomegranate.’

I dipped my fingers in the brick-brown mixture and lobbed some more on the betel leaf.

‘More kattha, Badru! More kattha!’ Nawaz spurred me.

‘You gone bonkers or what?’ I said. ‘More than this and your mouth will dry up forever like a eunuch’s privates. This kattha is potent stuff, you know,’ I counseled like a sage and packed the paans into separate packets.

Now, every morning, Nawaz pockets the two paans, piles his books on his cycle’s carrier seat, and rides off, looking like the destitute prince of some newly impoverished territory.

Ah, there’s Nawaz-saab riding into our lane. On entering our gate, he will slide off his cycle, chain it to a railing in the car park and climb up to our flat. For the two hours Nawaz-saab teaches me Urdu poetry, maroon liquid will repeatedly streak down the sides of his mouth. He will wipe it away with a stained handkerchief and continue to expound.

Yesterday, Nawaz-saab asked me to memorize this verse:

Ah, these words, these words! What rhythm! What magnificence! It is a couplet by Faiz. One of his very first verses. Nawaz-saab says, when Faiz first recited these words at a gathering of fellow poets, an eavesdropping businessman swooned at their sheer beauty. Today, Nawaz-saab will reveal the couplet’s meaning.

‘You must first get accustomed to the sound, Abhay,’ he says. ‘Urdu poetry is to be secreted like silk. Savor every strand, Abhay, savor every strand.’

Nawaz-saab is right. When basking in the sun of Urdu poetry, there’s no use hurrying; I must let its beauty and wisdom invade me like a tan.

I don’t know Urdu. I don’t know Urdu and I will never forgive my parents for it. Will never forgive them for such a dry, artless upbringing, devoid of culture or beauty—no music, no ideas, nothing. Money—that’s the be-all and end-all of the artistry my lineage has ever dabbled in.

I tried explaining this to Swati. She would have none of it. ‘I’m sorry, Abhay, you’re just too crude! We have tremendous physical chemistry, agreed, but we can’t be in bed all the time. What about the mornings or during meals? What do we talk of then? How many
pro
grams you
de
bugged? I want someone immersed in life, someone who can buy me diamonds while fascinating me with his take on Pynchon’s works.’

I heaved tragically, ‘Okay, Swati, okay. I may not have read Pynchon, but I’ll show you. When I return from India, you’ll see. I’ll be arty, just as you like. Please, will you marry me then?’

She tightened her grip on my hair. ‘God, Abhay, if you don’t like all this stuff, it’s okay. Maybe I’m just not the one for you.’

‘No, Swati, no!’ I looked up from between her thighs. ‘You’re the one for me! Give me two months. When I come back to Boston, I promise I’ll be dripping with the humanities like you won’t believe.’

Swati yielded, and I flew to India two days later for a vacation with a mission: the artification of Abhay Joshi.

Mom and dad were confounded by my outbursts. ‘The woman I love won’t marry me because I’m a ruffian! You know how that feels, dad? DD, Hindi films, Hindi songs—that’s all you both ever gave me. I’m going to lose the woman I love because you two couldn’t care about life’s finer things!’

As I recovered from jet lag, my befuddled begetters frantically arranged to pack in a childhood’s worth of refinement in two months. Dad visited a sitarist in Bhandup to request a crash course in the instrument. ‘How crashed a course did you have in mind?’ the sitarist asked. ‘A month and a half long,’ dad replied. The man doubled over hysterically.

After spreading the word around, mom remained luckless. She gifted me something by Narayan and took to masterminding daily feasts.

‘This place is supposed to be a motherlode of culture!’ I exclaimed one night over dinner. ‘Where’s the goddamn culture? I don’t see any culture. Where’s the culture?’

Days passed. Narayan became progressively unchallenging, and my chances with Swati lessened by the minute. ‘Maybe some other girl…?’ mom suggested and fled to
escape my cold stare.

Then a call came, in the third week, for dad. It was Firoz-saab, the sitar instructor who had laughed him out. He was sorry, and wanted to help. Dad put his hand over the phone and mimed across the room:
Would I be interested in learning Urdu poetry? Ghalib, Faiz, Sheikh?

Would I ever!

‘Expect Nawaz-saab tomorrow morning,’ Firoz-saab said, ‘and please don’t offend him by haggling. For the revelation of a precious and life-altering body of Urdu poetry, three thousand rupees is surely a joke.’

For a life with Swati, sixty dollars were truly nothing.

When mom opened the door the next morning at ten, it was as if our epiphanies had come alive. She bowed while moving aside to let Nawaz-saab in.

‘Please,’ dad invited him in, ‘come. Have a seat.’

The sherwani-clad man with fine features and a mouth red with paan looked around with the creative nervousness of an artist. On his way to the sofa, he banged his toes against the leg of a dining chair and nearly tripped over an edge of the carpet. Then he dropped the pile of books he was carrying. Dad helped him gather them. When Nawaz-saab finally managed to sit down, I believe all three of us considered it a personal accomplishment.

He sat across us, staring like a Buddha at the floor near his feet. Nawaz-saab seemed just slightly older than Abhay. Chunky beads of sweat swelled on his forehead and rivulets flowed down his sideburns into his sherwani’s collar. Must not have been earning enough to afford square meals—the poor fellow was practically floating in his clothes!

So it was all about this. Abhay sneering at our favorite TV shows and groaning at our nightly radio programs. Abhay flinging aside our
Reader’s Digests
and
Chitralekhas.
The past three weeks of making Shilpa and me feel like disastrous parents. This scrawny man with a mouthful of paan was to amend Abhay’s dull upbringing by teaching him Urdu poetry.

Abhay says we are cultureless. That his mother and I never exposed him to the arts; never made provision for the refinement that comes from contact with sublimity. Doesn’t
Abhay realize? He is our art. He is my mural, my novella, and the verse I invested my years in. Instead of providing for him, would he rather I had painted and his mother sung?

Intoxicated by the self-obsessed psychological hyper-awareness his stay in America has triggered, Abhay thinks he can demand answers and justifications from everyone. I suspect he has the courage to do so only with us, his parents. His girlfriend in America has him whirling on the edge of her whimsical fingernail, customizing Abhay as her fancy dictates. It makes Shilpa angry at times. But I say, ‘Let go, let go. In a month Abhay will return to America. Then we can resume our peaceful routine.’

Children overestimate their importance in their parents’ lives. Toward Abhay I feel a cool detachment. When he told me how much his American employer pays him, I had felt some astonishment that this youngster, whom the world is wanting to own, is a product of
me!
But otherwise I feel toward him a neutral objectivity. Abhay must never learn of this, of course. He must believe my enthusiasm during his visits to India.

When I married, I fell in love with Shilpa. Two years later, I lost my heart to my daughter Avantika. And three years after that, Abhay became my world. Now? No one. I am in love with no one. I have replaced them all with nothingness. A blank mind. Borrowed opinions. Manufactured entertainment. A thriving gift shop for my livelihood and a
hard bed as per my tastes. What else is there to life? Music? Painting?
Poetry?
Bah! Art is for those who are clumsy at real life. Such people squirrel away everything—memories, emotions, and opinions—for later.

When you love like the ocean and wound like Christ, art and beauty ooze from everything you do.

Abhay needs to become a parent, I think. And so does Swati, his girlfriend. They need to snap out of the clinical preoccupation with the mind and feel the mess, sweat, dirt, blood, and mucus of real life. The day Abhay hears the first screech of their newborn, I am certain all this regret over an artless upbringing and head-breaking over Urdu poetry will seem a frivolous waste of time. Children are the ultimate grounding for the rootless.

I just hope Abhay isn’t as unfortunate as me, to fall out of love with his own offspring. Or maybe…

Maybe when it does happen—when Abhay’s heart doesn’t beat for his child anymore—this Urdu poetry will stave off the nothingness and give Abhay something to look forward to. Maybe this brief contact with art will be all that remains. Could I also find something to look forward to other than the shop, a cricket match, or the next meal? Is there really a way out of this nothingness? What the hell is Abhay going on about?

So one day even Mr. Joshi decided to learn Urdu poetry. He said, ‘Nawaz-saab, I want to sample profundity before it is too late. My son says you are an excellent teacher. Let me sit with Abhay, please; you can teach us both.’

I almost swallowed the entire paan in alarm. I asked the old man if he knew Urdu.

‘How difficult can it be?’ he asked. ‘It’s mostly like Gujarati, no?’

Abhay widened his eyes in angry disbelief. ‘What’re you saying, dad? Urdu’s nothing like Gujju! All those Persian words and complex sentence structures!’

Mr. Joshi grinned. ‘Okay, okay, if I don’t understand, Nawaz-saab can explain to me. Fine?’

I countered discouragingly: an additional student would mean extra fees.

The old man agreed to pay an equal amount for himself—in advance!

My gloom turned a deeper shade of black.

The next morning Mr. Joshi received me, dressed in a starched white kurta-pajama. He trailed behind me on our way to the balcony. ‘Nawaz-saab, I haven’t learned anything new in decades, you know. Since I started the shop, my life has only been about profit and loss and…’ he dried up mid-sentence when we entered the sunny balcony where Abhay was sitting cross-legged on a rug. Abhay shifted aside to make room for his father. The old man placed a hand on his son’s shoulder and began settling down with dying-animal groans. My ammi does that too.

‘Okay, Nawaz-saab,’ Mr. Joshi said, rubbing his palms like a gurkha on a cold night, ‘we are ready for Urdu poetry.’

I sat on a settee facing them and said, ‘First, I will explain the verse I asked Abhay to memorize yesterday. Then, I will teach three–four new verses.’

Mr. Joshi nodded with wide-eyed absorption, while his son, usually receptive and eager, looked around dazed and sullen. A senior person’s overenthusiasm can be quite irritating. To quell the old man’s exuberance, I asked Abhay to recite the verse.

Abhay nodded gravely. He closed his eyes and said, ‘Bukhara-e junoon shabo khayalon roo maaheer… Bukhara-e junoon shabo khayalon roo maaheer—Laila ilmata jaan-bajaan sekha.’

The hair on my skin bristled. Abhay had repeated the
first two lines like they did in films.

‘What was that? Junoon
what
khayalon?’ Mr. Joshi asked with intense interest.

‘Shabo khayalon,’ Abhay mumbled.

The old man narrowed his eyes and begged, ‘Please, Abhay, say it again, na! It was so beautiful.’

Abhay obliged with hesitation.

On hearing it again, Mr. Joshi swayed his head as if in a trance, ‘Wow, Laila ilmata jaan-bajaan sekha, simply superb! Nawaz-saab, quickly, the meaning!’

I studied the floor around my toes with a poetic pensiveness.
Bukhara-e junoon shabo khayalon roo maaheer—Laila ilmata jaan-bajaan sekha.
The meaning. My jaw shifted from side to side, pounding the paan in my mouth to oblivion. The meaning. I picked up one of my books, flipped through it and stared at the Arabic squiggles across some random page.

‘Er, Nawaz-saab, the meaning?’ Mr. Joshi coughed politely.

I looked up with a start. ‘Ah, yes, the meaning.’

I swallowed a bit of the pungent paan liquid, squeezed the pulp into one cheek, and began, ‘Measles…’

I went to the window. I spat a perfect arc of blood-red juice and returned to my seat. ‘Measles…’

I looked at their faces. The old man seemed on the verge of an orgasm. Abhay’s indifference had vanished too. Both were now looking at me like they were jewelers and I was the
penniless customer who had swallowed a precious diamond that they would do anything to get back.

‘Measles…that…that cause multicolor mumps to… to…to…’

I crumpled my face. ‘I cannot do this!’

I stood up. ‘Sorry, the mood is gone. I cannot teach poetry today.’

I shivered my hand over my skull. ‘I feel frazzled!’

I stormed out the door, ran down the stairs, and cycled like a maniac all the way home.

Standing in the kitchen, waiting for the pressure cooker to whistle, Mrs. Joshi absent-mindedly traced the letters a-v-a-n-t-i-k-a on the wall with her wet finger.

Earlier in the morning, while mulling over a crossword clue, she had doodled a-v-a-n-t-i-k-a on the edge of the newspaper; on coming to, she had drawn several lines across what she had scribbled. But the kitchen, unlike the newspaper and the rest of the house, was Mrs. Joshi’s domain. Reading the watermark on the wall, she experienced a severe shortage of breath, like the absence of a lung named a-v-a-n-t-i-k-a.

The cooker hissed its last. Mrs. Joshi heard the main door bang open and someone rushing out. Mr. Joshi came to the kitchen. Mrs. Joshi flung a handful of water on the wall.
I will divorce you if you take her name in this house again,
Mr. Joshi had warned his wife, and then he had mouthed a line
from one of the C-grade potboilers he loved to watch:
this day forth, that girl is dead for me.