456r
'Your mind isn't on the tip of your nib,' said Rasheed. 'If you want to make use of my time - and I am here at your service - why not concentrate on what you're doing ?'
'Yes, yes, all right, all right,' said Maan shortly, sounding for a second remarkably like his father. He tried again. The Urdu alphabet, he felt, was difficult, multiform, fussy, elusive, unlike either the solid Hindi or the solid English script.
v 'I can't do this. It looks beautiful on the printed page, *but to write it -'
'Try again. Don't be impatient.' Rasheed took the bamboo pen from his hand, dipped it in the inkwell, and wrote a perfect, dark blue 'meem'. He then wrote another below it: the letters were identical, as two letters rarely are.
'What does it matter, anyway?' asked Maan, looking up from the sloping desk at which he was sitting, crosslegged, on the floor. 'I want to read Urdu and to write it, not to practise calligraphy. Do I have to do this?' He reflected that he was asking for permission as he used to when he was a child. Rasheed was no older than he was, but had taken complete control of him in his role as a teacher.
'Well, you have put yourself in my hands, and I don't want you to start on shaky foundations. So what would you like to read now ?' Rasheed inquired with a slight smile, hoping that Maan's answer would not be the predictable one once more.
'Ghazals,' said Maan unhesitatingly. 'Mir, Ghalib, Dagh.
'Yes, well -' Rasheed said nothing for a while. There was tension in his eyes at the thought of having to teach ghazals to Maan shortly before going over passages of the Holy Book with Tasneem.
'So what do you say?' said Maan. 'Why don't we start today ?'
'That would be like teaching a baby to run the marathon,' Rasheed responded after a few seconds, having found an analogy ridiculous enough to suit his dismay.
457'Eventually, of course, you will be able to. But for now, just try that meem again.'
Maan put the pen down and stood up. He knew that Saeeda Bai was paying Rasheed, and he sensed that Rasheed needed the money. He had nothing against his teacher; in a way he liked his conscientiousness. But he rebelled against his attempt to impose a new infancy on him. What Rasheed was pointing out to him was the first step on an endless and intolerably tedious road; at this rate it would be years before he would be able to read even those ghazals that he knew by heart. And decades before he could pen the love-letters he yearned to write. Yet Saeeda Bai had made a compulsory half-hour lesson a day with Rasheed 'the little bitter foretaste' that would whet his appetite for her company.
The whole thing was so cruelly erratic, however, thought Maan. Sometimes she would see him, sometimes not, just as it suited her. He had no sense of what to expect, and it ruined his concentration. And so here he had to sit in a cool room on the ground floor of his beloved's house with his back hunched over a pad with sixty aliphs and forty zaals and twenty misshapen meems, while occasionally a few magical notes from the harmonium, a phrase from the sarangi, a strain of a thumri floated down the inner balcony and filtered through the door to frustrate both his lesson and him.
Maan never enjoyed being entirely by himself at the best of times, but these evenings, when his lesson was over, if word came through Bibbo or Ishaq that Saeeda Bai preferred to be alone, he felt crazy with unhappiness and frustration. Then, if Firoz and Imtiaz were not at home, and if family life appeared, as it usually did, unbearably bland and tense and pointless, Maan would fall in with his latest acquaintances, the Rajkumar of Marh and his set, and lose his sorrows and his money in gambling and drink.
'Look, if you aren't in the mood for a lesson today….' Rasheed's voice was kinder than Maan had expected, though there was rather a sharp expression on his wolflike face.
458'No, no, that's fine. Let's go on. It's just a question of self-control.' Maan sat down again.
'Indeed it is,' said Rasheed, reverting to his former tone of voice. Self-control, it struck him, was what Maan needed even more than perfect meems. 'Why have you got yourself trapped in a place like this?' he wanted to ask Maan. 'Isn't it pathetic that you should be sacrificing your dignity for a person of Saeeda Begum's profession ?'
Perhaps all this was present in his three crisp words. At 1 any rate, Maan suddenly felt like confiding in him.
'You see, it's like this -' began Maan. 'I have a weak will, and when I fall into bad company -' He stopped. What on earth was he saying? And how would Rasheed know what he was talking about ? And why, even if he did, should he care ?
But Rasheed appeared to understand. 'When I was younger,' he said, 'I - who now consider myself truly sober - would spend my time beating people up. My grandfather used to do so in our village, and he was a well-respected man, so I thought that beating people up was what made people look up to him. There were about five or six of us, and we would egg each other on. We'd just go up to some schoolfellow, who might be wandering innocently along, and slap him hard across the face. What I would never have dared to do alone, I did without any hesitation in company. But, well, I don't any more. I've learned to follow another voice, to be alone and to understand things - maybe to be alone and to be misunderstood.'
To Maan this sounded like the advice of a good angel; or perhaps a risen one. In his imagination's eye he saw the Rajkumar and Rasheed struggling for, his soul. One was coaxing him towards hell with five poker cards, one beating him towards paradise with a quill. He botched another meem before asking :
'And is your grandfather still alive ?'
'Oh yes,' said Rasheed, frowning. 'He sits on a cot in the shade and reads the Quran Sharif all day, and chases the village children away when they disturb him. And soon
459he will try to chase the officers of the law away too, because he doesn't like your father's plans.'
'So you're zamindars ?' Maan was surprised.
Rasheed thought this over before saying: 'My grandfather was, before he divided his wealth among his sons. And so is my father and so is my, well, my uncle. As for myself -' He paused, appeared to look over Maan's page, then continued, without finishing his previous sentence, 'Well, who am I to set myself up in judgment in these matters ? They are very happy, naturally, to keep things as they are. But I have lived in the village almost all my life, and I have seen the whole system. I know how it works. The zamindars - and my family is not so extraordinary as to be an exception to this - the zamindars do nothing but make their living from the misery of others; and they try to force their sons into the same ugly mould as themselves.' Here Rasheed paused, and the area around the corners of his mouth tightened. 'If their sons want to do anything else, they make life miserable for them too,' he continued. 'They talk a great deal about family honour, but they have no sense of honour except to gratify the promises of pleasure they have made to themselves.'
He was silent for a second, as if hesitating; then went on:
'Some of the most respected of landlords do not even keep their word, they are so petty. You might find this hard to believe but I was virtually offered a job here in Brahmpur as the curator of the library of one such great man, but when I got to the grand house I was told - well, anyway, all this is irrelevant. The main fact is that the system of landlords isn't good for the villagers, it isn't good for the countryside as a whole, it isn't good for the country, and until it goes….' The sentence remained unfinished. Rasheed was pressing his fingertips to his forehead, as if he was in pain.
This was a far cry from meem, but Maan listened with sympathy to the young tutor, who appeared to speak out of some terrible pressure, not merely of circumstances.
460Only a few minutes earlier he had been counselling care, concentration, and moderation for Maan.
There was a knock on the door, and Rasheed quickly straightened up. Ishaq Khan and Motu Chand entered.
'Our apologies, Kapoor Sahib.'
'No, no, you're quite right to enter,' said Maan. 'The time for my lesson is over, and I'm depriving Begum Sahiba's sister of her Arabic.' He got up. 'Well, I'll see you v tomorrow, and my meems will be matchless,' he promised ^Rasheed impetuously. 'Well ?' he nodded genially at the musicians, 'Is it life or death ?'
But from Motu Chand's downcast looks he anticipated Ishaq Khan's words.
'Kapoor Sahib, I fear that this evening - I mean the Begum Sahiba asked me to inform you '
'Yes, yes,' said Maan, angry and hurt. 'Good. My deep respects to the Begum Sahiba. Till tomorrow, then.'
'It is just that she is indisposed.' Ishaq disliked lying and was bad at it.
'Yes,' said Maan, who would have been very much more concerned if he had believed in her indisposition. 'I trust that she will recover rapidly.' At the door he turned and added: 'If I thought it would do any good, I would prescribe her a string of meems, one to be taken every hour and several before she retires.'
Motu Chand looked at Ishaq for a clue, but Ishaq's face reflected his own perplexity.
'It's no more than she has prescribed for me,' said Maan. 'And, as you can see, I am flourishing as a result. My soul, at any rate, has avoided indisposition as successfully as she has been avoiding me.'
6.17
RASHEED was just picking up his books when Ishaq Khan, who was still standing by the door, blurted out :
'And Tasneem is indisposed as well.'
Motu Chand glanced at his friend. Rasheed's back was
461towards them, but it had stiffened. He had heard Ishaq Khan's excuse to Maan; it had not increased his respect for the sarangi player that he had acted in this demeaning manner as an emissary for Saeeda Bai. Was he now acting as an emissary for Tasneem as well ?
'What gives you that understanding ?' he asked, turning around slowly.
Ishaq Khan coloured at the patent disbelief in the teacher's voice.
'Well, whatever state she is in now, she will be indisposed after her lesson with you,' he replied challengingly. And, indeed, it was true. Tasneem was often in tears after her lessons with Rasheed.
'She has a tendency to tears,' said Rasheed, sounding more harsh than he intended. 'But she is not unintelligent and is making good progress. If there are any problems with my teaching, her guardian can inform me in person or in writing.'
'Can't you be a little less rigorous with her, Master Sahib ?' said Ishaq hotly. 'She is a delicate girl. She is not training to become a mullah, you know. Or a haafiz.'
And yet, tears or no tears, reflected Ishaq painfully, Tasneem was spending so much of her spare time on Arabic these days that she had very little left for anyone e'ise. Her Wessons appeared to have recnrectea Viet even irom romantic novels. Did he really wish her young teacher to start behaving gently towards her ?
Rasheed had gathered up his papers and books. He now spoke almost to himself. 'I am no more rigorous with her than I am with' - he had been about to say 'myself 'with anyone else. One's emotions are largely a matter of self-control. Nothing is painless,' he added a little bitterly.
Ishaq's eyes flashed. Motu Chand placed a restraining hand on his shoulder.
'And anyway,' continued Rasheed, 'Tasneem has a tendency to indolence.'
'She appears to have lots of tendencies, Master Sahib.'
Rasheed frowned. 'And this is exacerbated by that halfwitted parakeet which she keeps interrupting her work to
462•*#•• *“•*
feed or indulge. It is no pleasure to hear fragments of the Book of God being mangled in the beak of a blasphemous bird.'
Ishaq was too dumbstruck to say anything. Rasheed walked past him and out of the room.
'What made you provoke him like that, Ishaq Bhai ?' said Motu Chand after a few seconds.
'Provoke him ? Why, he provoked me. His last remark -'
'He couldn't have known that you had given her the parakeet.'
'Why, everyone knows.'
'He probably doesn't. He doesn't interest himself in that kind of thing, our upright Rasheed. What got into you? Why are you provoking everyone these days ?'
The reference to Ustad Majeed Khan was not lost on Ishaq, but the subject was one he could hardly bear to think of. He said :
'So that owl book provoked you, did it? Have you tried any of its recipes? How many women has it lured into your power, Motu ? And what does your wife have to say about your new-found prowess ?'
'You know what I mean,' said Motu Chand, undeflected. 'Listen, Ishaq, there's nothing to be gained by putting people's backs up. Just now -'
'It's these wretched hands of mine,' cried Ishaq, holding them up and looking at them as if he hated them. 'These wretched hands. For the last hour upstairs it has been torture.'
'But you were playing so well -'
'What will happen to me? To my younger brothers? I can't get employment on the basis of my brilliant wit. And even my brother-in-law won't be able to come to Brahmpur to help us now. How can I show my face at the radio station, let alone ask for a transfer for him ?'
