Two Short Novels (2 page)

Lament on the Death of a
Master of Arts
Dedicated to Marian Evans

Lament on the Death of a
Master of Arts

‘
O
he
,
what is your condition?’ Nur heard the voice of his father through his broken half-sleep as from faraway. His eyes opened against his will. In the stillness of that hour the gigantic, padded-faced, wry-mouthed presence of the Chaudhri, terrifying like Nero, seemed inauspicious. Nur closed his eyes, dipping them into the comfort of sleep and escaping from the fear that his father’s form sent through him . . . .

‘
Ohe,
what is your condition? I am asking you,’ said the Chaudhri advancing from the foot of the bed. And, without waiting for an answer, he continued: ‘Have you been comfortable in the night? You haven’t had any blood, I hope?’

Nur was terrified that his father would come nearer. Half opening his eyes, he said in a whisper: ‘Better.’ And, as if to ward off the Chaudhri’s stare, he tried to assume the casual tones of the healthy person which he knew he was expected to be.

‘Why can’t you answer properly, swine? Why do you sulk all the time?’ the Chaudhri said, his grey-green eyes flashing. ‘You should try and make an effort to get well, as I can’t go on breaking myself to pay the Doctor’s fees every morning?’

‘I am better, Chaudhri
ji,’
Nur said, still assuming a normal manner. ‘I am much better.’

‘
Achha
then, wake up now and mention the name of Allah-
mian
for a change,’ the Chaudhri said softening. And he hesitated for a moment, looked round the bed and added: ‘Your grandmother will be coming down soon
. . . .
’

Then shaking his head and making a grimace, he swerved on his feet and walked away.

Nur closed his eyes so as not to see his retreating form. A moment before the Chaudhri had turned, the boy’s gaze had fallen on the prickly silver bristles of his unshaven beard and he recoiled. He could hear the stamping of the Chaudhri’s feet going down the stairs. He quavered, struggling to throw off the spell of fear which his father cast on him. He twisted his lips as waves of resentment warmed his heavy, sleepy limbs. ‘No, I don’t want to live,’ he said with the obstinate spite of a child, and then to strengthen his sense of opposition, added: ‘I wish I were dead.’ And as soon as he said it he wanted to stifle the thought: his father’s footsteps were out of the reach of his ears now.

The body of death lingered on the sick bed, wrapped in a white shroud
. . . .

Waking in a hot sweat from his half-sleep he could see it lying there, on the giant bed in the narrow front room on the first floor of his father’s congested two-storied house. It was his own body; it looked like a corpse because he had gathered the sheet tight round him at night, and because he was dying, dying of consumption.

A slight tremor of panic ran through him at the thought, with a subtle violence. He stirred on his back and shuffled his legs about. Then, quickly loosening the sheet from his side, as if he were arranging himself in readiness for the visit of the Doctor, he spread the cloth till it sagged into a ruffled disorder, and sought to still
the ache of apprehension.

If only his heart would stop fluttering, he thought impatiently. ‘You mustn’t talk of death,’ as grandma would say, ‘May I be your sacrifice; and what an inauspicious talk they do.’

He moved his head, but couldn’t shake off the vision, so he began to hum the melody of a verse written by Iqbal, his wife’s namesake, a favourite tune of his. The half-serious, half-playful sentiment in it was so appropriate.

‘Your love has straightened all the curves of my life
. . .
’

He didn’t complete the verse; the lack of faith in his voice betrayed the fear for his lungs.

He was becoming obsessed again now
. . .

His fine face, with the slightly dilated nostrils, with the brown eyes bulging out of the deep sockets and the indrawn cheeks, was flushed, not with the rich pink of the Sahibs, as it had always been flushed since his childhood, but with the shame of a rose which has withered before it has begun to bloom. His body was limp except for the spine, which ached as it had ached increasingly through having to lie in bed day after day for five months, and the hard ribs and collarbone which seemed to crack as they rose out of his transparent flesh like the dry roots of a bare tree still sound at the heart. But he was calm as if his whole body, eaten through by the germ, was sensitive to his doom; the clear forehead that sighted with cool composure each anxious thought in his fevered brain, wrestling with the problem of how to get well; the skeleton of his chest which rose and fell with the nervous heartbeats beneath it as if eager to know how to get better; the tender eyes that bent their light, now inwards, now outwards, and the dry lips on which the ghost of a sigh waited to become evanescent.

During the past months he had felt his perceptions become acuter: he had noticed the change from summer to autumn in almost every shade of air, as it touched his eyes, his lips, his ears and the cells of his body. But lucidity of this knowledge was being continually baulked by the fear, the obsession which possessed him.

He turned over and felt the terror of falling from the terrace at the top of the house. Only it was like a fall in a slow motion picture, slipping slowly past every fraction of an inch. If only one could catch hold of the projection of the terrace, or if only there was an obstruction on the way, one might be saved. Why didn’t the Chaudhri have wooden awnings built on the top of the windows? They would have arrested the glare of the sun during the day, and they would have checked a fall if someone, anyone, a child or, no, a cat fell.

He made an effort to stop the morbid run of his thought, shook his head as if to deafen his own cries and blinked his eyes at the phantom of peril.

‘Life is short and art is long,’ he muttered tiredly a phrase he had learnt at college. Then he lifted his head and looked at the bars of light which shone like the silvery spokes of the day through the chinks of the closed windows. ‘Grandmother will be coming down from the kitchen to see me,’ he said to himself.

She always came down first thing in the morning, the poor old woman, and again the last thing at night. And when he was a child, she had told him lots of fairy stories. He remembered that one which she had told him after his mother had died and which he had retold her with several variations during the holidays.

‘How did it run?’

Once upon a time there was a little boy whose father was a confectioner in the bazaar and whose mother was a beautiful houri. And he had an old grandmother who loved him very much and who used to take him to his father’s shop to eat a sweet pancake and semolina every morning. And he used to toddle and walk holding the hand of his father among the grease and the grime, among the soot of steaming cauldrons and deep black-bottomed pans, full of treacle and clarified butter, and the mud of coolies’ feet bearing sacks of sugar, fruit and flour. And then he had learnt to speak. And when he spoke it was such a pretty speech that they said to his father: ‘He ought to be sent to the Government school when he grows up, for he will surely become a babu with his pretty speech.’ And because he had a lovely pink face, with dark brown eyes and sleek brown hair, they said: ‘He will surely pass his M.A. and become a deputy collector sahib.’ And he had been so happy to hear their prophecies, and he had become so naughty and enthusiastic, that he would smack anybody who did not give him a pice just as if he were already a deputy collector. But when he was five, the cruel angel Izrael had come and taken away his mother. And he had cried when his mother, who was a houri, did not come back from the heaven where she had gone visiting. And another woman had come into their house instead, who, his father had said, was his new mother. But she was only a little bigger than he and he could not call her mother as she quarrelled with him over the toys when they played together. And he had been sad as he had never been sad before. But his grandmother loved him and doted upon him just like his mother, and she laid him in her arms as she made garlands for sale in the bazaar. And then, one day, his father had come to him and said to him that he was grown up now and must go to school to learn to be a big babu and get an M.A. pass, and that he would receive a pice a day for his pocket if he did his lessons well, and that if in addition he came home and learnt the Koran and said the five prayers prescribed by religion, he would get two pice. And that was the day he had started to be a ‘Master of Arts’.

‘But, oh, why did they drag me into the dust by making me a Master of Arts?’ he wearily protested, falling back exhausted, the words trailing like a long pain though they had emerged quite casually in a spontaneous new rhythm.

There was the glow of revelation about them, about the ordinary but natural and expressive sequence into which they had flowed, even though they were born of the doom which sat on him. And the memories of his past seemed to come back to him in their track as if they were an ‘open sesame’; with the force and vivacity of rapiers thrust in the raw wounds of his heart. For from the first cry at birth his life had been pain-marred.

‘Sh, sh,’ his mother had warned the world and consoled him, the inconsolable: ‘What is it?’ then, ‘didums, di, di, mother’s darling, di, didi, dum
. . .
’ then ‘he is hungry
. . .
don’t cry’, then, ‘mother’s dearest, loveliest darling
. . .
he has been neglected’, then
. . .
‘my pet
. . .
my darling
. . .
don’t cry then
. . . .
’ And she had swayed him in her arms, cheek to cheek, flesh to flesh in tenderness
. . .
slow glory of touch crept into the rapture of smiles, bubbling with the joy of being borne and tickled to laughter
. . .

‘Oh mother, oh mother, where are you
now?’

Beyond the corpse in the darkness of the grave she had become a ghost. In the silence of his doom he wondered whether through the barriers of all these years, her heart could still beat with a piteous sound for him, whether it could still bleed with warm love and anguish at the sound of his tears. ‘In the name of the merciful and the compassionate God,’ she used to say, and gather him into her arms if he woke up in the night, gather him with a surging agony of warmth, answered only by his cries, and still patient when his father heaped all the curses and all the abuse, all the complaints of the mortal wrongs he had suffered to be awakened by the row
. . . .
Ebbing with time, receding into thin air, remote she was now, buried under the mound of earth in the cemetery outside Lohgarh gate, which was surrounded by the aura of fear in the night, of suspense in the still whiteness of the noon, except on Fridays when people went to visit the Pir who kept guard on the graves and muttered charms to keep the ghosts away, in return for the gifts and for the pice tendered to him. He remembered the horror of a moment when his grandmother had taken him there and he had seen a skull beside a crumbling mound in the empty sockets of which millions of ants were crawling. He had wondered whether his mother had become an ugly demon with a malevolent steady stare in the pits of her head and a terrible changeless grin on the thrusted teeth
exposed from hard, indrawn lips.