The Death of Mr Love, page 11
‘Now,’ he said, ‘we need a float.’ He took a peacock feather and shaved away all the glorious blue and green-gold vanes, leaving a white stem, which he cut into three-inch lengths.
To the tip of the rod he attached a line, and to the line, on a sliding knot, one of the lengths of feather stem.
‘Wouldn’t use rods like this at home,’ he said to Fever. ‘I’d use a proper rod, with a reel and all.’
She looked blank and it turned out that by ‘home’ he meant England. He had never been there, but then neither had Fever.
Next day we went with our new rods, Rosie following.
I took an empty tin for worms.
‘Where do you get them? Do you buy them?’
‘You’ll see.’ I guessed that, being a girl, she wouldn’t like this. All around the pond in the grass were cowpats in various stages of decay. I showed her how to lift the drier portions. The slime below was full of writhing pink bodies.
‘Ugh, I’m not doing that.’
I picked out a worm, broke it into four jerking pieces and showed her how to work one of them onto the hook.
‘It’s horrible,’ she said. ‘I feel sorry for them.’
‘They don’t feel anything. Anyway, each bit grows into a new worm, so throw one bit on the ground, and it’s the same as setting it free. They don’t mind . . . There, now you do it.’
‘I can’t’, she said.
But I insisted. If she wanted to fish with me, she would have to bait her own hook. Rosie screamed. Fever, in her Edwardian child’s frock, was on her knees in a cowpat with creatures wriggling out between her fingers.
Rosie insisted on following us everywhere, but we did our best to give her the slip. We took exceptionally difficult routes up steep places, or through thick bushes. She soon had to give up, but still she did her best to spy on us. As we neared home, we would see her standing on the verandah watching the path.
Once, returning from a tryst with Jula, we saw her umbrella bobbing behind us across the wet hillside. Later she complained to Sybil, ‘Killymem, I see Misskilly playing with a dirty village boy and she was wearing his hat. Who knows what lice and what all?’
But Sybil did not want to hear. She didn’t scold us and Rosie went away in a huff. I overheard Sybil saying to my mother, ‘. . . that woman, spying on me all the time.’ I knew that Rosie went round telling our servants that Killy Memsahib was no good. Not a real Killigrew. Maybe this was why Auntie Sybil cried such a lot. She and my mother spent a great deal of time in my mother’s office, talking earnestly in low voices.
‘They’re talking about love and things like that,’ Fever told me, and opened her eyes very wide as if nothing more need be said.
‘You know this love stuff,’ I said. ‘Well, um, I don’t love you or anything, but I like you quite a lot.’
She cried ‘Oh!’ and I didn’t know if I’d offended her. But she came close, put her hands on either side of my face and kissed me on my lips. ‘I love you, Bhalu,’ she said. ‘You’re my best friend. You’re so clever and brave and I don’t know what I’d do without you.’
That, I suppose, was the moment. I fell in love with her.
After that Rosie did not go out with us any more, but she seemed determined to punish us. One day I took Fever to one of my favourite places, where a stream came showering over a small cliff and formed a deep pool among the rocks.
‘Look out for snakes,’ I told her. The hillsides were alive with cobras driven from their holes by the rain. But it was a glorious day, one of those hot sunny days you get in the middle of the monsoon. The sun shone down through the trees and into the pool, lighting it up from within, like an aquarium.
In the pool you could find danios, long as your middle finger, striped bright blue along their silver bodies. There were comical-looking loaches to be tickled from under stones on the stream bed. We stood, still as rocks, up to our knees in water, submerging a handkerchief by its four corners and waiting for fish to swim over. We caught a dozen small fish and put them in a small zinc pail we had brought for the purpose. We intended to start our own fish tank at home. Our clothes were soon soaked, transparently clinging.
‘We’ll get in terrible trouble,’ she said. ‘We’d better take them off and let them dry in the sun.’
‘What? And go around with no clothes?’
‘I don’t mind if you don’t.’
So we took off all our clothes – I can remember thinking how pale and thin she was and how helpless that little cleft looked, where her legs joined. She saw me looking and said, ‘I’ve never seen one of those before either.’
Then she had a fit of giggles and said, ‘This is what it was like before God lost His temper.’
She walked to a nearby sal sapling, stood on tiptoes, broke off two leaves the size of dinner plates and gave one of them to me. ‘And this is what He made them do afterwards . . .’ She cocked her head and posed, leaf in place, with a knowing smile.
So we threw the leaves away and spent all the rest of that sunny afternoon bathing under the waterfall and swimming in the pool.
Back home we had just installed our captures in a large glass jar when Rosie came storming in, furious. She paraded us before Sybil, made Phoebe strip to her knickers, then pulled them down.
‘See, Killymem! See! It is all over,’ tracing the marks of sun on Phoebe’s hip. She added, ‘No use seeing Bhalu, he’s an Indian.’
But once again, Sybil was not interested. Maya was summoned and the case put before her. She told Rosie in a voice that teetered on the edge of anger that Sybil was not to be troubled with such things. She had been very ill. She needed time to recover. Later, Rosie took our jar and emptied it, fish and all, down the drain.
My mother and Sybil spent a great deal of time together. Sybil hardly ever went out. Maya got our doctor to visit her regularly. Fever told me that the doctor had prescribed iron tablets, and I wondered what eating pellets of iron must do to Auntie Sybil’s teeth. She was told to rest, so the two of them sat in my mother’s office and read, often aloud to one another, and swapped family stories. The Killigrews had a history every bit as romantic as our own. They had been in India for generations. Once upon a time they had been in the opium trade. They too had fought in the 1857 war, but on the British side. My mother urged Sybil to write down these stories. They could publish them jointly. As Sybil said, there are two sides to every story but rarely are the two sides to be found in the same book. Maya said that there were in fact many more than two sides, but two sides would be enough. If reliving buried hurts could make them disappear, it would be wise to give our family histories a thorough airing.
During their last few days with us, Fever followed me around like a puppy. Ben said he knew I was in love with her, because I was always pulling her pigtails.
‘One day y’all’ll get married,’ he said, but we knew otherwise.
‘I’m never going to marry,’ she told me one night.
She slept in my room and we would lie awake and talk. Our beds were side by side. We would reach out and touch hands across the gap. There was a game we played in the dark. Trailing one’s fingertips over the other’s arm from wrist to elbow was a ‘long’. Tickling the palm was a ‘little’. We’d take it in turns to give and receive these small, exquisite pleasures: ‘Bhalu, do twenty longs,’ ‘Fever, give ten littles.’
‘My mum and dad don’t love each other,’ she told me that night. ‘That’s why we came here. Mummy got ill, I used to hear her being sick every morning. She said not to tell my dad, ’cos he would be angry. She cries when she thinks no one can see.’
I couldn’t imagine anyone not loving Auntie Sybil. She had been so sweet, so full of fun. Fever’s dad must be a monster.
I said, ‘If you don’t marry then I won’t either.’
She said, out of the darkness, ‘I’d marry you, Bhalu.’
They were to leave us in September, before the end of the rains. My mother said Sybil had decided to return to England for her health, and was taking Phoebe. She did not know how long they would be gone. Phoebe was nervous. She had never been to England before. I promised I would write, giving her Jula’s news, Ben’s news, my news.
About a fortnight before they left a tremendous thunderstorm shook the hillsides. We could not go outside to play, so we asked my mother to tell us a story.
NAFÍSA JAAN (‘SWEET’ VERSION)
I clearly remember the day when Maya first told us the story of Nafísa Jaan. An afternoon dark as night, wind and rain beating on the house, oil lamps casting capering shadows (blackout caused by lightning strikes). It was too wet to do anything. Even Dhondu squatted in the shelter of the chicken-house and smoked one beedi after another. We children could not go out to play, so we were in the house, bored. My mother offered to tell us a story.
‘Shivaji and the ghorpats!’ I cried.
Shivaji was the Mahratta chief who had lived in these hills three hundred years before us, and spent his life fighting the armies sent against him by the Mughal emperor Alamgir and the Muslim Sultan of Bijapur. Shivaji’s life was full of astounding adventures, but the best one was the way he recaptured the fort of Sinhagarh, the ‘lion fortress’, which was built on a huge cliff not many miles from our house. Sinhagarh had fallen into enemy hands. Shivaji wanted to take the garrison by surprise. He and his Mahrattas scoured the jungle for the biggest ghorpats (monitor lizards) they could find. Ghorpats are immensely strong and their toes cling for dear life to the rock face. Shivaji and his men tied ropes round the ghorpats’ waists and set them on the cliff. The lizards began to climb the cliff. When they reached the top, Shivaji and his men swarmed up the ropes.
‘You’ve already had that three times,’ said my mother.
Sybil asked to hear Nafísa Jaan. Maya had written two versions of this story, the ‘sweet’ and the ‘bitter’. Sybil wanted the ‘sweet’ Nafísa Jaan. For some reason my mother seemed reluctant.
‘Not that story’, she said. ‘Choose another one.’
But Sybil, pale and wearing her dark glasses despite the gloom of the day, insisted. A peculiar hard expression on her face. So Maya began.
This story began a very long time ago and it has still not ended. Out of all the beginnings that one could choose, I would say that if a man called Lajju had not picked up a sword that he found lying on a battlefield in 1858, then the woman who called herself Nafísa Jaan would never have been born. And if the things that happened to Nafísa Jaan had not happened, then some of us sitting here would not have been born. Forty years after Thrice-Great, Lajju and Bhalu the First returned from the great rebellion . . . are you listening to this, Bhalu the Second?
[Yes, I am listening. Of course I’m listening. We all are. We are all there, sitting on our verandah, with the storm pressing down on us, rain hissing like knives on the roof and on the grass ‘chicks’ which were tied up all around the house like so many large flat irrlas. I am there with my sister Nina. Ben is there. Jula is there, curled up in a corner, smiling, though he knows not a word of English. The two ayahs, Shashi and Rosie, are there. The story is being told in English, because listening with us are our guests, my mother’s friend Sybil and little blonde Fever.]
. . . the Kumharawans were still rebels. Many families, not least ours, had things to hide. Dozens of the older men had fought in Nana Saheb’s army. The town was full of unwhispered secrets, but outwardly, in the havelis and courtyards and tea shops, life went on in its slow rhythms. Every winter, flights of duck arrived from across the Himalayas to honk in the marshes. In summer the bazaar filled, as it still does today, with uncouth Tibetans, come down from the mountains to sell trinkets of turquoise and silver, and the tubers of wild orchids.
Kumharawa was small, and less important than ever before in its history, but pride dictated that it should have its own squadron of cavalry. It also had a kotwal, a chief-of-police, who stood six foot six inches in his socks. The Raja, Qasim Khan, lived in a moon-palace – it was known as the Chand Mahal – which stood in huge grounds on the edge of the town. It was not a very ancient building, but it contained a zenana, in which lived the Rani and her children, two girls. Qasim Khan dearly loved his daughters but longed for a son. As a result, his wife was used to seeing a great deal of him. But then, for no very obvious reason, his visits began to tail off, and finally stopped. It was a servant who told the Rani what just everyone else in Kumharawa already knew, that Qasim Khan was spending his evenings, and some of his days, at a certain house in the oldest part of the town. In this house lived a tawaif, a singer, known as Nafísa Jaan.
yeh na thi hamari qismat keh wisaal-e-yaar hota
agar aur jeeté rahté yehi intezaar hota
To be with him, that man I adored, was never to be my fate,
And had I lived longer, all the longer I’d have had to wait
Nafísa could sing the ghazals of Ghalib in a way that destroyed your heart, yet her voice was never described as sweet. She was no Lata. Hers was, by all accounts, a harsh voice, but one capable of the most devastating honesty. She understood the poetry. When she sang
tere waadé par jiyee ham to yeh jaan jhoot jana
keh khushi se mar na jaaté, agar intezaar hota
Do your promises keep me alive? If so, my life’s a lie.
If I believed them I’d have died of joy, now wouldn’t I?
her voice was both honey and vinegar. In one syllable she could convey sarcasm, longing, anger, love. They used to say of her that if Ghalib’s words were inspired, it was she who breathed life into them. Not only this, but she could dance! She played games with the eyes that our filmi actresses could hardly dream of. And more . . . Parts of this story can’t be told until some people here are older. And, no, Miss Phoebe, that doesn’t mean I am concealing the truth.
A story is not like a running track. A story is a river, made by the joining of many streams. We can explore a few, but we can’t turn back to trace them all. We have to choose carefully. A story is also like a road. It leads forward, but turnings constantly branch off from it. We may go down a few, but not all. Some are even dangerous. Every breath of a good story contains other stories, entering and leaving it, most of which will never be heard. That’s what makes a good story good.
And now, after taking that detour, I can return to the main stream by telling you that Nafísa Jaan was herself a master of the art of storytelling. She had been trained in the kothas of Lucknow, or so it was said, for Nafísa never talked of her origins. She moved in a whirlwind of rumour. Some said she was the child of a noble Turkish family, stolen away and sold by her nurse. Others, because she could quote the beautiful love songs of Rumi’s Diwan-e-Shams in Persian, said that her father must have been a wandering sufi poet. But the favourite story was that Nafísa was the illegitimate daughter of Mirza Ghalib himself, the child he had wanted all his life, whom in his last years he had taught to sing his poems. Ghalib was as old as the century. During the great rebellion he was living in Delhi where he witnessed the fighting and the atrocities of both sides. Nafísa could only have been his daughter if, at the time of our story, she’d been in her late thirties. But everyone who saw her described her as ‘youthful’. Raja Qasim Khan, enamoured less of the verses she spoke than of the mouth that spoke them, started calling her his jaan-e-janaan, his ‘life and soul’, which, when this became known in Kumharawa, caused a great deal of sniggering at his expense. The truth about Nafísa’s origins was, as you might expect, rather ordinary, but only two people knew it.
The Raja was quite besotted with her and was, as I have already said, soon spending all his time at her house. However flattering his attentions may at first have been, Nafísa Jaan must soon have found them suffocating. Nafísa was a unique and cultured woman. Her world was drawing rooms and music. She could flavour betel paans and conversation with equal subtlety. She could play chess. She could argue points of philosophy with maulvis and pandits. You could never accuse her of being a doormat. She was a woman born out of her time, a bright mind condemned by a society which undervalued women to a life of subservience, the work of a houri. Qasim Khan, who epitomised that society, doted on her. In her company he was no longer the dull, flabby, middle-aged, ruler-in-name of an insignificant state, but a maharaja, a nawaab, a prince with a destiny. And Nafísa, shrewd as she was clever, shamelessly flattered him.
Qasim Khan liked to think of himself as a shootin’-huntin’-fishin’ man. No animal in the forest, from Almora to Kathaniya Ghat, was safe from him. The trophy room in his palace was full of deer heads, boar heads, tiger heads, that glared at you off the walls with sad glass eyes. He would shoot anything. Once, in the company of your great-grandfather, he saw a one-horned spotted deer and could not resist potting even that. The miserable trophy was mounted and sent round to our house, where our Bhalu, yes, Bhalu the Second, this Bhalu sitting here, one day found it.
[True. Exploring Grandfather’s house in Kumharawa, one day I found a storeroom full of interesting things. Huge clay jars, taller than a man, with two-inch thick wooden lids. I slid one aside and saw that the jar was full of wheat. There was a metal trunk, like a large seaman’s chest, filled to the top with rice. In a smaller trunk I found a neatly folded naval uniform and my father’s dress sword, together with a diary which he had begun on 3 September 1939 and which petered out a few days later. In a corner was the carved wooden face of a deer, with a single antler fixed to it.]
Nafísa was not an outdoor girl, but she developed a mysterious liking for picnics. She said it was for her health, and for the same reason, she stopped granting him certain favours. Our hero used to take her to a mango grove by a lake where there stood, side by side, a small Hindu temple and a white maqbara which housed the bones of a Muslim saint. On these occasions he and his escort would ride while she was carried in a palqi because – this was her only fault – she was a rotten horsewoman.
