‘I’m not concerned about all that,’ said Maan, laughing. ‘A short one is fine by me.’
‘So you don’t mind whether she’s tall or short, dark or fair, thin or fat, ugly or beautiful?’
‘Z for A again,’ said Maan, glancing in the direction of her roof. ‘By the way, I like your method of drying your blouses.’
The woman gave a short hoot of laughter, which might have been self-deprecatory if it hadn’t been so loud. She looked back at the rack-like arrangement of steel on the top of her water tank.
‘There’s no other place on my roof,’ she said. ‘You’ve got lines all over on your side. . You know,’ continued the woman, off on a tangent, ‘marriage is strange. I read in Star-Gazer that a girl from Madras, well married, with two children, saw Hulchul five times — five times! — and got completely besotted with Daleep Kumar — to the extent that she went off her head. She went down to Bombay, clearly not knowing what she was doing, because she didn’t even have his address. Then she found it with the help of one of these filmi fan magazines, took a taxi there, and confronted him with all kinds of mad, obsessed remarks. Eventually he gave her a hundred rupees to help her get back, and threw her out. But she returned.’
‘Daleep Kumar!’ said Veena, frowning. ‘I don’t think much of his acting. I think he must have made it all up for publicity.’
‘Oh no, no! Have you seen him in Deedar? He is amazing! And Star-Gazer says he’s such a nice man — he would never go after publicity. You must tell Kedarnath to beware of Madrasi women, he spends so much time there, they’re very fierce. . I hear that they don’t even wash their silk saris gently, they just go dhup! dhup! dhup! like washerwomen under the tap — Oh! my milk!’ cried the woman in sudden alarm. ‘I must go — I hope it hasn’t — my husband—’ And she rushed off like a great red apparition across the rooftops.
Maan burst out laughing.
‘Now I’m off as well,’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough of life outside the colonies. My brain’s whirring too much.’
‘You can’t go,’ said Veena sternly and sweetly. ‘You’ve just come. They said you played Holi the whole morning with Pran and his professor and Savita and Lata, so you can certainly spend this afternoon with us. And Bhaskar will be very annoyed if he misses you again. You should have seen him yesterday. He looked like a black imp.’
‘Will he be at the shop this evening?’ asked Maan, coughing a bit.
‘Yes. I suppose so. Thinking about the patterns of the shoeboxes. Strange boy,’ said Veena.
‘Then I’ll visit him on my way back.’
‘On your way back from where?’ asked Veena. ‘And aren’t you coming for dinner?’
‘I’ll try — I promise,’ said Maan.
‘What’s wrong with your throat?’ asked Veena. ‘You’ve been up till late, haven’t you? How late, I wonder? Or is it just from getting soaked at Holi? I’ll give you some dushanda to cure it.’
‘No — that vile stuff! Take it yourself as a preventative,’ exclaimed Maan.
‘So — how was the singing? And the singer?’ asked Veena.
Maan shrugged so indifferently that Veena got worried.
‘Be careful, Maan,’ she warned him.
Maan knew his sister too well to try to protest his innocence. Besides, Veena would soon enough hear about his public flirting.
‘It’s not her that you’re going to visit?’ asked Veena sharply.
‘No — heaven forbid,’ said Maan.
‘Yes, heaven forbid. So where are you going?’
‘To the Barsaat Mahal,’ said Maan. ‘Come along with me! You remember we used to go there for picnics as children? Come. All you’re doing is playing chaupar.’
‘So that’s how you think I fill my days, do you? Let me tell you, I work almost as hard as Ammaji. Which reminds me, I saw yesterday that they’d chopped the top of the neem tree down, the one you used to climb to get to the upstairs window. It makes a difference to Prem Nivas.’
‘Yes, she was very angry,’ said Maan, thinking of his mother. ‘The Public Works Department were just supposed to trim it to get rid of the vulture’s roost, but they hired a contractor who chopped down as much wood as possible and made off with it. But you know Ammaji. All she said was, “What you have done is really not right.”’
‘If Baoji had been in the least concerned about these matters, he’d have done to that man what he did to that tree,’ said Veena. ‘There’s so little greenery in this part of town that you really learn to appreciate it when you see it. When my friend Priya came to Pran’s wedding, the garden was looking so beautiful that she said to me: “I feel as if I’ve been let out of a cage.” She doesn’t even have a roof garden, poor thing. And they hardly ever let her out of the house. “Come in the palanquin, leave on the bier”: that’s the way it is with the daughters-in-law in that house.’ Veena looked darkly over the rooftops towards her friend’s house in the next neighbourhood. A thought struck her. ‘Did Baoji talk to anyone about Pran’s job yesterday evening? Doesn’t the Governor have something to do with these appointments? In his capacity as Chancellor of the university?’
‘If he did I didn’t hear him,’ said Maan.
‘Hmm,’ said Veena, not very pleased. ‘If I know Baoji, he probably thought about it, and then pushed the thought aside as being unworthy of him. Even we had to wait in line for our turn to get that pitiful compensation for the loss of our business in Lahore. And that too when Ammaji was working day and night in the refugee camps. I sometimes think he cares for nothing but politics. Priya says her father’s equally bad. All right, eight o’clock. I’ll make your favourite alu paratha.’
‘You can bully Kedarnath, but not me,’ said Maan with a smile.
‘All right, go, go!’ said Veena, tossing her head. ‘You’d think we were still in Lahore from the amount we get to see you.’
Maan made a propitiatory sound, a tongue-click followed by a half-sigh.
‘With all his sales trips, I sometimes feel I have a quarter of a husband,’ continued Veena. ‘And an eighth of a brother each.’ She rolled up the chaupar board. ‘When are you returning to Banaras to do an honest day’s work?’
‘Ah, Banaras,’ said Maan with a smile, as if Veena had suggested Saturn. And Veena left it at that.
2.8
It was evening by the time Maan got to the Barsaat Mahal, and the grounds were not crowded. He walked through the arched entrance in the boundary wall, and passed through the outer grounds, a sort of park which was for the most part covered with dry grass and bushes. A few antelope browsed under a large neem tree, bounding lazily away as he approached.
The inner wall was lower, the arched entranceway less imposing, more delicate. Verses from the Quran in black stone and bold geometrical patterns in coloured stone were embedded in its marble facade. Like the outer wall, the inner wall ran along three sides of a rectangle. The fourth side was common to both: a sheer drop from a stone platform — protected only by a balustrade — to the waters of the Ganga below.
Between the inner entrance and the river was the celebrated garden and the small but exquisite palace. The garden itself was a triumph as much of geometry as of horticulture. It was unlikely in fact that the flowers with which it was now planted — other than jasmine and the dark-red, deep-scented Indian rose — were the same as those for which it had been planned more than two centuries ago. What few flowers remained now looked exhausted from the daily heat. But the well-tended, well-watered lawns, the great, shady neem trees dispersed symmetrically about the grounds, and the narrow sandstone strips that divided the flower beds and lawns into octagons and squares provided an island of calm in a troubled and crowded town. Most beautiful of all was the small, perfectly shaped pleasure-palace of the Nawabs of Brahmpur, set in the exact centre of the inner gardens, a filigreed jewel box of white marble, its spirit compounded equally of extravagant dissipation and architectural restraint.