Macaulay’s comments on Shakespeare, Plato and Cicero were as trenchant as they were discriminating, and the editor clearly believed that the marginalia of his distinguished uncle were well worth publishing. His own remarks were openly admiring: ‘Even for Cicero’s poetry Macaulay had enough respect to distinguish carefully between the bad and the less bad,’ was one sentence that drew a mild smile from the Nawab Sahib.
But what, after all, thought the Nawab Sahib, is worth doing, and what is not? For people like me at least things are in decline, and I do not feel it worth my while consuming the rest of my life fighting politicians or tenants or silverfish or my son-in-law or Abida to preserve and maintain worlds that I find exhausting to preserve or maintain. Each of us lives in a small domain and returns to nothing. I suppose if I had a distinguished uncle I might spend a year or two collating and printing his marginal notes.
And he fell to musing about how Baitar House would eventually fall into ruin with the abolition of zamindari and the exhaustion of funds from the estate. Already it was becoming difficult, according to his munshi, to extract the standard rent from the tenants. They pleaded hard times, but underneath the pleas was the sense that the political equations of ownership and dependence were inexorably shifting. Among those who were most vocal against the Nawab Sahib were some whom he had treated with exceptional leniency, even generosity, in the past, and who found this difficult to forgive.
What would survive him? It occurred to him that although he had dabbled in Urdu poetry much of his life, he had never written a single poem, a single couplet, that would be remembered. Those who do not live in Brahmpur decry the poetry of Mast, he thought, but they can complete in their sleep many of the ghazals he has written. It struck him, with a start, that there had never been a truly scholarly edition of the poems of Mast, and he began to stare at the motes in the beam of sunlight that fell on his table.
Perhaps, he said to himself, this is the labour that I am best fitted for at this stage of things. At any rate, it is probably what I would most enjoy.
He read on, savouring the insight with which Macaulay unsparingly analysed the character of Cicero, a man taken over by the aristocracy into which he had been adopted, two-faced, eaten up by vanity and hatred, yet undoubtedly ‘great’. The Nawab Sahib, who thought much of death these days, was startled by Macaulay’s remark: ‘I really think that he met with little more than his deserts from the Triumvirs.’
Despite the fact that the book had been dusted with a white preservative powder, a silverfish crawled out of the spine and scuttled across the band of sunlight on the round table. The Nawab Sahib looked at it for an instant, and wondered what had happened to the young man who had sounded so enthusiastic about taking charge of his library. He had said he would come over to Baitar House but that had been the last that the Nawab Sahib had heard of him — and it must have been at least a month ago. He shut the book and shook it, opened it again on a random page, and continued reading as if the new paragraph had led directly on from the previous one:
The document which he most admired in the whole collection of the correspondence was Caesar’s answer to Cicero’s message of gratitude for the humanity which the conqueror had displayed towards those political adversaries who had fallen into his power at the surrender of Corfinium. It contained (so Macaulay used to say) the finest sentence ever written:
‘I triumph and rejoice that my action should have obtained your approval; nor am I disturbed when I hear it said that those whom I have sent off alive and free will again bear arms against me; for there is nothing which I so much covet as that I should be like myself, and they like themselves.’
The Nawab Sahib read the sentence several times. He had once hired a Latin tutor but had not got very far. Now he attempted to fit the resonant phrases of the English to what must have been the still more resonant phrases of the original. He sat in a reverie for a good ten minutes meditating on the content and manner of the sentence, and would have continued to do so had he not felt a tug at the leg of his pyjamas.
5.11
It was his younger grandson, Abbas, who was tugging at him with both hands. The Nawab Sahib had not seen him come in, and looked at him with pleased surprise. A little behind Abbas stood his six-year-old brother Hassan. And behind Hassan stood the old servant, Ghulam Rusool.
The servant announced that lunch was waiting for the Nawab Sahib and his daughter in the small room adjoining the zenana quarters. He also apologized for allowing Hassan and Abbas into the library when the Nawab Sahib was reading. ‘But Sahib, they insisted, and would not listen to reason.’
The Nawab Sahib nodded his approval and turned happily from Macaulay and Cicero to Hassan and Abbas.
‘Are we eating on the floor or at the table today, Nana-jaan?’ asked Hassan.
‘It’s just us — so we’ll eat inside — on the rug,’ replied his grandfather.
‘Oh, good,’ said Hassan, who got nervous when his feet were not on the ground.
‘What’s in that room, Nana-jaan?’ asked three-year-old Abbas as they walked down a corridor past a room with a huge brass lock.
‘Mongooses, of course,’ said his elder brother knowledgeably.
‘No, I mean inside the room,’ Abbas insisted.
‘I think we store some carpets in there,’ said the Nawab Sahib. Turning to Ghulam Rusool, he asked: ‘What do we store in there?’
‘Sahib, they say it has been two years since that room was locked. It is all on a list with Murtaza Ali. I will ask him and inform you.’
‘Oh no, that’s not necessary,’ said the Nawab Sahib stroking his beard and trying to recall — for, to his surprise, it had slipped his mind — who used to use that particular room. ‘As long as it’s on a list,’ he said.
‘Tell us a ghost story, Nana-jaan,’ said Hassan, tugging at his grandfather’s right hand.
‘Yes, yes,’ said Abbas, who readily agreed with most of his elder brother’s suggestions, even when he did not understand what was being suggested. ‘Tell us a ghost story.’
‘No, no,’ said the Nawab Sahib. ‘All the ghost stories I know are very frightening and if I tell you one you’ll be so frightened you won’t be able to eat your lunch.’
‘We won’t be frightened,’ said Hassan.
‘Not frightened,’ said Abbas.
They reached the small room where lunch was awaiting them. The Nawab Sahib smiled to see his daughter, and washed his and his grandsons’ hands in a small washbasin with cool water from a nearby jug, and sat them down, each in front of a small thali into which food had already been served.
‘Do you know what your two sons are demanding of me?’ asked the Nawab Sahib.
Zainab turned to her children and scolded them.
‘I told you not to disturb your Nana-jaan in the library, but the moment my back is turned you do what you like. Now what have you been asking for?’
‘Nothing,’ said Hassan, rather sullenly.
‘Nothing,’ repeated Abbas, sweetly.
Zainab looked at her father with affection and thought of the days when she used to cling on to his hands and make her own importunate demands, often using his indulgence to get around her mother’s firmness. He was sitting on the rug in front of his silver thali with the same erect bearing that she remembered from her earliest childhood, but the thinness of the flesh on his cheekbones and the small square moth-holes on his immaculately starched kurta filled her with a sudden tenderness. It had been ten years since her mother had died — her own children only knew of her through photographs and stories — and those ten years of widowerhood had aged her father as twenty years would have done in the ordinary course of time.