For an instant I felt that someone other than Ghulam Ali was speaking. All kinds of thoughts arose in my mind. Had Ghulam Ali completely forgotten his oath? Had he broken entirely with his political past? That passion to win India its independence, that temerity, where had it gone? What had happened to the boyish timbre of that voice? Where was Nigar? Had it pleased her in the end to mother two slave children? Perhaps she’d died. Perhaps Ghulam Ali had married again?
‘What are you thinking? Speak to me, man. We’re meeting after such a long time,’ Ghulam Ali said, slapping me hard on the shoulders.
I had fallen into silence. ‘Yes,’ I said with a start, still wondering how to initiate conversation. But without waiting for me, Ghulam Ali began, ‘This shop is mine. I’ve been in Bombay for the past two years. The business is going really well. I end up saving some three, four hundred every month. What are you up to? I hear you’ve become a famous short story writer. Do you remember we once ran away from home and came here? But it’s a strange thing, man, that Bombay and this Bombay seem so different. It feels as though that was smaller, and this bigger, somehow.’
In the meantime, a customer appeared, wanting tennis shoes. Ghulam told him, ‘We don’t stock anything made of rubber here. Try the shop next door.’ When he’d gone, I said to Ghulam Ali, ‘Why don’t you stock anything made of rubber? In fact, I myself was just in there, looking for crepe rubber soled shoes.’
I’d asked the question casually, but Ghulam Ali’s face all of a sudden became expressionless. In a low voice, he said no more than, ‘I don’t like it.’
‘Don’t like what?’
‘Just that, rubber; things made from rubber.’
Saying this, he feigned a smile, but failing, cackled mirthlessly. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he continued, ‘I have a horror of it, but it has a very deep connection to my life.’
An expression of profound anxiety appeared on Ghulam Ali’s face. His eyes, which still had some sparkle, dimmed for a moment, then brightened again. ‘It was rubbish, man, that life. To tell the truth, Saadat, I’ve forgotten those days completely, when I had politics on the brain. For four or five years now, I’ve been living in great peace. I have a wife, kids… God’s been kind.’
Moved still by God’s kindness, Ghulam Ali began talking shop, about how much capital he’d begun with, his annual profit, how much he now had in the bank. I stopped him mid-sentence. ‘You were saying that you had a horror of something and that it had a deep connection to your life.’
Once again his face became expressionless. He emitted a loud ‘yes’ and replied, ‘There was a deep connection. Fortunately, there no longer is. But I’ll have to tell you the whole story.’
In the meantime, his servant reappeared. Ghulam Ali put him in charge of the shop, and took me inside to his room. There, he sat me down and recounted at length the story of how his hatred of rubber had come to him.
‘I don’t need to tell you how my political life began, you know the story well. There’s no need to tell you what my character was, you know that too. We were very alike in many ways. I mean to say that neither of our parents was in a position to say, “Our sons are perfect.” I don’t know why I’m telling you this, perhaps only to say, as you probably already know, that I was not a man of particularly firm character. But what I did have was the urge to do something. This is what drew me to politics. And I can say with all honesty that I wasn’t a liar. I was prepared to give my life for my country. Even now, I’m prepared. But I’ve come to the conclusion, after much thought and consideration, that India’s politics and its leaders are all, to a man, unready, just as I was. A wave rises, it is provoked, as far as I can tell, for waves don’t rise by themselves, but perhaps I’m not explaining it very well…’
Ghulam Ali’s thoughts were confused. I handed him a cigarette. He lit it, took three large drags and said, ‘What do you think? Don’t you feel that our every effort towards independence has been unnatural, not the effort I mean, but that its result has been unnatural every time? Why haven’t we attained independence? Are we all in some way unmanly? No, we’re all man enough. But we’re in a climate in which our good, strong hand is not even allowed to reach near independence.’
‘Do you mean to say that there’s something standing in the way of us and independence?’ I asked.
Ghulam Ali’s eyes brightened. ‘Absolutely. But this is not some solid wall, not a real barrier. It’s a thin membrane: our own politics, our false existence, in which we not only deceive others, but ourselves as well.’
As before, his thoughts were scattered. My feeling was that he was trying to refresh in his mind, his own past experiences. He put out the cigarette and looking directly at me, said in a loud voice, ‘Men must stay as they are. Is it necessary that someone doing good works should shave his head, don ascetic robes or rub ash over his body? You might say it’s a matter of choice, of will. But I say that it’s from this will itself, from this strange thing man possesses, that they become unmoored. The ones who rise above these things become oblivious to the natural weakness of men. They forget that their strength of character, their views, their principles, all blow away and are forgotten, and all that remain stamped on the minds of naive human beings are their shaved heads, their ash-covered bodies and their ascetic’s clothes.’ Ghulam Ali became still more impassioned. ‘So many spiritual teachers have been born into the world. And though people have forgotten their teachings, their crucifixes, religious threads, beards, steel bangles and armpit hair endure. We, today, are more experienced than the people who lived here a thousand years before. And yet I can’t understand how the spiritual leaders of today don’t see that they are disfiguring people. I’ve felt the urge many times to start screaming, “For God’s sake let men remain men! You’ve defaced them already, fine, now have mercy on their condition. While you’re busy trying to make gods out of them, those poor wretches are losing whatever humanity they do have!” Saadat, I swear to God, this is my soul speaking, I’m telling you what I’ve experienced myself. If what I’m saying is wrong, then nothing is good or right. Two years, two full years, I spent wrestling with my mind. I fought with my heart, my conscience, my body, with every tiny hair on it, but each time I arrived at this conclusion: men must remain men. One in a thousand might kill his appetites, but if everyone was to kill their appetites, one has to ask: where is this mass killing getting us?’ With this, he reached for another cigarette. He burned the matchstick to the end trying to light it, then gave his neck a light jerk. ‘Nothing, Saadat! You don’t know the spiritual and physical misery I’ve had to bear. But anyone who goes against nature is bound to know misery. That day, you’ll recall, when in Jallianwala Bagh, I announced that Nigar and I would not give birth to slave children, I felt a strange kind of electric happiness. I felt, after this announcement, that my head had risen to touch the sky. But when I got out of jail, I began slowly to feel the pain of it… It was a source of torment to realise that I had paralysed a vital part of my soul and body. I took the most beautiful flower from the garden of my life and crushed it in my fingers. In the beginning, I derived a satisfaction from this realisation, knowing that I had done something others couldn’t do. But slowly, reality, with all its bitterness, began to sink in.