Saeeda Bai clapped her hands and called for Bibbo.
Bibbo came running.
‘Bibbo, are we on the voting list for Pasand Bagh?’ she demanded.
Bibbo did not know, but she thought they were not. ‘Should I try to find out?’ she asked.
‘No. It is not necessary.’
‘Whatever you say, Begum Sahiba.’
‘Where were you this afternoon? I was looking for you everywhere.’
‘I had gone out, Begum Sahiba, to buy some matches.’
‘Does it take an hour to buy matches?’
Saeeda Bai was becoming determinedly annoyed.
Bibbo was silent. She could not very well tell Saeeda Bai, who had been in such a flap about Rasheed, that she had surreptitiously been carrying letters to and fro between Firoz and Tasneem.
Saeeda Bai now turned briskly to Maan: ‘Why are you lingering here?’ she asked him. ‘There are no votes to be had in this house.’
‘Saeeda Begum—’ protested Maan.
Saeeda Bai said sharply to Bibbo: ‘What are you gawking at? Didn’t you hear me tell you to go?’
Bibbo grinned and left. Suddenly Saeeda Bai got up and went into her room. She returned with three of the letters Rasheed had mailed Tasneem.
‘His address is on these,’ she said to Maan as she threw them on to the low table. Maan noted the address down in his unformed Urdu script, noticing, however, that Rasheed’s writing was very much worse than he remembered it.
‘There is something wrong with his head. You will find him a liability in your electoral endeavours,’ said Saeeda Bai.
The rest of the evening was not a success. Public life had entered the boudoir, and together with it all Saeeda Bai’s fears for Tasneem.
After a while she reverted to a kind of dreaminess again.
‘When do you leave?’ she asked Maan indifferently.
‘In three days, Inshallah,’ replied Maan as cheerfully as he could.
‘Inshallah,’ repeated the parakeet, responding to a phrase he recognized. Maan turned towards it and frowned. He was in no mood for the half-witted bird. A weight had descended on him; Saeeda Bai, it appeared, did not care whether he stayed or left.
‘I am tired,’ said Saeeda Bai.
‘May I visit you on the eve of my departure?’
‘No longer did I desire to wander in the garden,’ murmured Saeeda Bai to herself, quoting Ghalib.
She was referring to Maan and to the fickleness of men in general, but Maan thought she was referring to herself.
17.3
Maan visited Rasheed’s room the next day. It was located in a seedy and crowded part of the old city with narrow, unrepaired lanes and the stench of poor drainage. Rasheed was living alone. He could not afford to keep his family with him in Brahmpur. He cooked for himself whenever he could, he gave his tuitions, he studied, he was involved in some work for the Socialist Party, and he was trying to write a pamphlet — half popular, half scholarly — on the sanction for and meaning of secularism in Islam. He had run his life for months on willpower rather than on a combination of food and affection. When he saw Maan at his door Rasheed looked astonished and worried. Maan noticed with a shock that even more of his hair had gone white. His face was gaunt, but his eyes still held a sort of fire.
‘Let us go for a walk,’ Rasheed suggested. ‘I have a tuition in an hour. There are too many flies here. Curzon Park is on the way. We can sit there and talk.’
In the mild December sunshine they sat in the park under a large, small-leafed ficus. Every time someone passed them, Rasheed would lower his voice. He looked extremely tired, but talked almost without stopping. Early on in the conversation it became apparent to Maan that Rasheed was not going to help his father in any sense. He was going to support the Socialist Party in the Salimpur-cum-Baitar constituency and he was, he said, going to campaign tirelessly for them and against the Congress throughout the university vacation. He talked endlessly about feudalism and superstition and the oppressive structure of society and especially the Nawab Sahib of Baitar’s role in the system. He said that the leaders of the Congress Party — and presumably Mahesh Kapoor — were hand in glove with the large landlords, which was why landlords would be compensated for the lands that were to be taken over by the state. ‘But the people will not be duped,’ he said. ‘They understand things only too well.’
So far Rasheed had spoken with great, perhaps slightly exaggerated, conviction, maybe even with excessive animus against the great landowner of the district, who he knew was Maan’s friend; but there was nothing particularly odd about his manner of speaking or the logic of it. The word ‘duped’, however, acted as a kind of fault or fracture in his speech. He suddenly turned to Maan and said pointedly:
‘Of course, people who are duped are wiser than you think.’
‘Of course,’ Maan agreed amiably, though he was rather disappointed. Rasheed, he thought, would have been very helpful to his father in the area around Debaria, and probably even in Salimpur town. If it had not been for Rasheed, he himself would not have known anything about the place.
‘To be honest,’ said Rasheed, ‘I won’t deny that I hated you as well as the others when I realized what you were trying to do.’
‘Me?’ said Maan. He could not see where he came into it, except that he was his father’s son. And, anyway, why hatred?
‘But I have put all that behind me,’ continued Rasheed. ‘Nothing is to be gained by hatred. But I must now ask for your help. Since you are partly responsible, you cannot deny me this.’
‘What are you talking about?’ asked Maan, bewildered. He had sensed, when he visited the village at Bakr-Id, that there was some tension involving Rasheed, but what had he to do with it?
‘Please do not pretend ignorance,’ said Rasheed. ‘You know my family; you have even met Meher’s mother — and yet you insisted on these events and these plans. You yourself are associated with the elder sister.’
What Saeeda Bai had said to Maan now clicked in his mind.
‘Tasneem?’ he asked. ‘Are you talking about Saeeda Bai and Tasneem?’
A hard look passed over Rasheed’s face — as if Maan had confirmed his own guilt. ‘If you know it, what is the need to take her name?’ he asked.
‘But I don’t know it — whatever it is,’ protested Maan, amazed by the turn in the conversation.
Rasheed, attempting to be reasonable, said: ‘I know that you and Saeeda Bai and others, including important people in the government, are trying to get me married to her. And she has decided on me. The letter she wrote — the looks she has given me — suddenly one day in the middle of her lesson she made a remark which could only mean one thing. I cannot sleep for worry, for three weeks I have hardly slept a wink. I do not want to do this, but I am afraid for her sanity. She will go insane unless I return her love. But even if I undertake this — which I must do on the basis of humanity — even if I undertake this, I must have protection for my own wife and children. You will have to get complete confirmation from Saeeda Begum about this. I will only agree on certain clear conditions.’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ said Maan a little sharply. ‘I am part of no plot—’
Rasheed cut him off. He was so annoyed that he was trembling. But he tried to get a hold on himself. ‘Please do not say that,’ he said. ‘I cannot accept it when you say this sort of thing to my very face. I know what is what. I have already said I bear no hatred towards you any longer. I have told myself that however mistaken your intentions, you were doing it for my good. But did you never give any thought to my wife and children?’