Maan’s thoughts were suddenly interrupted by the sight of Firoz standing by a pavement stall. He halted the tonga at once and got down.
‘Firoz, you’ll have a long life — I was just thinking about you. Well, half an hour ago!’
Firoz said that he was just wandering about, and had decided to buy a walking stick.
‘For yourself or for your father?’
‘For myself.’
‘A man who has to buy himself a walking stick in his twenties might not have such a long life after all,’ said Maan.
Firoz, after leaning at various angles on various sticks, decided upon one and, without haggling about the price, bought it.
‘And you, what are you doing here? Paying a visit to Tarbuz ka Bazaar?’ he asked.
‘Don’t be disgusting,’ said Maan cheerfully. Tarbuz ka Bazaar was the street of singing girls and prostitutes.
‘Oh, but I forgot,’ said Firoz slyly: ‘Why should you consort with mere melons when you can taste the peaches of Samarkand?’
Maan frowned.
‘What further news of Saeeda Bai?’ continued Firoz, who, from the back of the audience, had enjoyed the previous night. Though he had left by midnight, he had sensed that, Maan’s engagement notwithstanding, romance was once again entering his friend’s life. More, perhaps, than anyone else, he knew and understood Maan.
‘What do you expect?’ asked Maan, a little glumly. ‘Things will happen the way they will. She didn’t even allow me to escort her back.’
This was quite unlike Maan, thought Firoz, who had very rarely seen his friend depressed. ‘So where are you going?’ he asked him.
‘To the Barsaat Mahal.’
‘To end it all?’ inquired Firoz tenderly. The parapet of the Barsaat Mahal faced the Ganga and was the venue of a number of romantic suicides every year.
‘Yes, yes, to end it all,’ said Maan impatiently. ‘Now tell me, Firoz, what do you advise?’
Firoz laughed. ‘Say that again. I can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘Maan Kapoor, beau of Brahmpur, at whose feet young women of good families, heedless of reputation, hasten to fling themselves like bees on a lotus, seeks the advice of the steely and stainless Firoz on how to proceed in a matter of the heart. You’re not asking for my legal advice, are you?’
‘If you’re going to act like that—’ began Maan, disgruntled. Suddenly a thought struck him. ‘Firoz, why is Saeeda Bai called Firozabadi? I thought she came from these parts.’
Firoz replied: ‘Well, her people did in fact originally come from Firozabad. But that’s all history. In fact her mother Mohsina Bai settled in Tarbuz ka Bazaar, and Saeeda Bai was brought up in this part of the city.’ He pointed his stick towards the disreputable quarter. ‘But naturally Saeeda Bai herself, now that she’s made good and lives in Pasand Bagh — and breathes the same air as you and I — doesn’t like people to talk about her local origins.’
Maan mused over this for a few moments. ‘How do you know so much about her?’ he asked, puzzled.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Firoz, waving away a fly. ‘This sort of information just floats around in the air.’ Not reacting to Maan’s look of astonishment, he went on, ‘But I must be off. My father wants me to meet someone boring who’s coming to tea.’ Firoz leapt into Maan’s tonga. ‘It’s too crowded to ride a tonga through Old Brahmpur; you’re better off on foot,’ he told Maan, and drove off.
Maan wandered along, mulling — but not for long — over what Firoz had said. He hummed a bit of the ghazal that had embedded itself in his mind, stopped to buy a paan (he preferred the spicier, darker green leaves of the desi paan to the paler Banarasi), manoeuvred his way across the road through a crowd of cycles, rickshaws, pushcarts, men and cattle, and found himself in Misri Mandi, near a small vegetable-stall, close to where his sister Veena lived.
Feeling guilty for having been asleep when she came to Prem Nivas the previous afternoon, Maan decided impulsively to visit her — and his brother-in-law Kedarnath and nephew Bhaskar. Maan was very fond of Bhaskar and liked throwing arithmetical problems at him like a ball to a performing seal.
As he entered the residential areas of Misri Mandi, the alleys became narrower and cooler and somewhat quieter, though there were still plenty of people getting about from place to place and others just lounging around or playing chess on the ledge near the Radhakrishna Temple, whose walls were still bright with the stains of Holi colours. The strip of bright sunlight above his head was now thin and unoppressive, and there were fewer flies. After turning into a still narrower alley, just three feet across, and avoiding a urinating cow, he arrived at his sister’s house.
It was a very narrow house: three storeys and a flat rooftop, with about a room and a half on each storey and a central grating in the middle of the stairwell that allowed light from the sky all the way through to the bottom. Maan entered through the unlocked door and saw old Mrs Tandon, Veena’s mother-in-law, cooking something in a pan. Old Mrs Tandon disapproved of Veena’s taste for music, and it was because of her that the family had had to come back the previous evening without listening to Saeeda Bai. She always gave Maan the shivers; and so, after a perfunctory greeting, he went up the stairs, and soon found Veena and Kedarnath on the roof — playing chaupar in the shade of a trellis and evidently deep in an argument.
2.7
Veena was a few years older than Maan, and she took after her mother in shape — she was short and a bit dumpy. When Maan appeared on the roof, her voice had been raised, and her plump, cheerful face was frowning, but when she saw Maan she beamed at him. Then she remembered something and frowned again.
‘So you’ve come to apologize. Good! And not a moment too soon. We were all very annoyed with you yesterday. What kind of brother are you, sleeping for hours on end when you know that we’re bound to visit Prem Nivas?’
‘But I thought you’d stay for the singing—’ said Maan.
‘Yes, yes,’ said Veena nodding her head. ‘I’m quite sure you thought of all that when you dozed off. It had nothing to do with bhang, for instance. And it simply slipped your mind that we had to get Kedarnath’s mother home before the music began. At least Pran came early and met us at Prem Nivas, with Savita and his mother-in-law and Lata—’
‘Oh, Pran, Pran, Pran—’ said Maan in exasperation. ‘He’s always the hero and I’m always the villain.’
‘That’s not true, don’t dramatize things,’ said Veena, thinking of Maan as a small boy trying to shoot pigeons with a catapult in the garden and claiming to be an archer in the Mahabharata. ‘It’s just that you have no sense of responsibility.’