Clear Light of Day Page 9

  Raja didn’t care. He climbed over the gate and jumped into the road rather than laboriously open and shut it, then strolled into the Hyder Alis’ garden, past the bushes of flowering jasmine and oleander, the rose beds and the fountain, slightly surprised to find the gathering much shrunk since he had last visited it. Many of the Hyder Alis’ friends seemed to have vanished. Had they already gone to the Pakistan that was to be? Raja wondered. He was slightly stalled, too, when he felt the welcome at the Hyder Alis’ not quite so warm, as gracious and effusive as before. He wondered if it could be because he had joined Hindu College and was studying English Literature instead of Urdu at Jamia Millia as Hyder Ali had advised him to do. But it was not Hyder Ali who was cool to him—in fact there was something gently loving in his gesture of placing his arm across the boy’s shoulders as he came up, somehow making Raja think that Hyder Ali had no son, only a daughter—a curious thought, never spoken of, yet clearly felt. It was his friends who seemed to fall silent when he came and to ostentatiously change the subject of discussion. The awkwardness did not last. Glasses of whisky were passed around, some poetry quoted, and soon they forgot Raja, or Raja’s Hindu presence, and picked up the subject they had dropped on seeing him—Pakistan, as ever Pakistan. Raja listened silently as they spoke of Jinnah, of Gandhi and Nehru, of Mountbatten and Attlee and Churchill, because he knew this was not a matter in which he should express an opinion, but he listened and he began to see Pakistan as they did—as a possibility, very close to them, palpable and real.

  When the boys at Hindu College found that Raja was one Hindu who actually accepted the idea of Pakistan as feasible, they changed from charmed friends into dangerous enemies. Raja, whose home and family gave him an exceptionally closed and sheltered background, was slow to realise this. The boys had taken him to tea-shops and given him cigarettes and samosas, he had gone to cinema shows with them, sung songs with them as they cycled back at night. Now they were strangely and abruptly altered. When he spoke to them of Pakistan as something he quite accepted, they turned on him openly, called him a traitor, drowned out his piping efforts at reasonableness with the powerful arguments of fanatics. Some of them, his two or three closest friends, disclosed to him that they were members of terrorist societies; they told him they were not giving in cravenly to the Dartitionine of the country no matter what Gandhi said or Nehru did—they were going to fight to defend their country, their society, their religion. As they declaimed, they watched Raja carefully for signs of wavering, of weakening. They so much wanted him to join them. He was so desirable as a member of their cause in his idealistic enthusiasm, his graceful carriage, his incipient heroism. They wanted him. They pursued him. When he did not come to college, they came to see him at his house, after dark.

  For Raja had fallen ill. His father and his aunt were convinced it was something to do with the atmosphere of that spring, the threatening, advancing violence in the air at one with the dust storms that gathered and broke, the koels that called frantically in the trees all day, the terrific heat that was already rising out of the parched, cracked yellow earth, and all the rumours that drifted in from the city like sand, or smoke. The doctor felt him over with the stethoscope, then ordered various tests to be carried out, saw the reports and said it was nothing so mental or emotional—the boy had become infected with tuberculosis.

  ‘Tuberculosis?’ Aunt Mira screamed, her voice slicing through Bim like a cold knife. ‘How can it be? The boy lives a healthy life—he drinks milk, eats eggs, eats meat . . .’ she stammered, beginning to shred the end of her sari with her hands.

  ‘No, no, it isn’t always malnutrition that brings it on,’ the doctor broke in irritably. ‘He could have picked up a germ while drinking tea from a dirty cup, from using a soiled towel somewhere. Anywhere. But it is t.b.,’ he insisted in the face of her incredulity.

  Raja, too, was incredulous. He felt ill. He felt he couldn’t get to his feet at all. To raise his head for a sip of water required a great effort and made a sharp pain leap and throb at his temples. But he was sure it was merely fatigue, anxiety, something to do with—what? He couldn’t quite say—so much whirled through his head: Lord Byron, heroism, Pakistan, Jinnah, Gandhi, the boys at college, hissing at him from behind the gate-post, Hyder Ali sipping his whisky so slowly and reflectively in that group of poets and politicians in the garden across the road. It made him quite giddy, as if he were being whirled about in a dust-storm.

  The whole family found it unacceptable that Raja was seriously ill. For a while they allowed the college boys to visit him, to sit about his bed, giving him news of refugee camps and killings, of looting and burning in the city, and pleading with him, in conspirators’ voices, to join their society. They would not let him go.

  ‘T.b?’ they scoffed. ‘The doctor’s mad. A little heat fever. You’ll soon be up. Then you can come with us. We’ll show you where we hide our guns, and daggers, and where we meet to exercise and practise—’

  They were sure Raja—so impetuous, so bold and dashing—would be fired by such talk. They cajoled him, they flattered. Aunt Mira even sent in lemonade for them to drink.

  But met with blazing opposition from Raja. He was too weak to say much, too weak and dizzy, but when he thought of Hyder Ali, of Hyder Ali’s library, of Hyder Ali’s Begum and daughter quietly humming and chattering as they embroidered their veils together, and all those cool, calm evenings in their garden that had made his spirit rejoice by offering it all he craved, he felt giddy with rage at these boys and what they stood for.

  Very near to tears in his weakness and frustration, he told them ‘I’ll tell the police that—I have only to phone the police to stop you—’

  ‘You would never do that,’ they gasped, taken aback. Then, more harshly, ‘We’ll see to it that you don’t do that. We’ll inform the police about you. You are more dangerous to India than we are—you’re a traitor.’

  That was what they must have done for soon a plainclothes policeman began to hover about their gate, from six in the evening to six in the morning, too punctually to be anything but a plainclothes policeman. Bim peered out through the bamboo screen at the door at him. At first she thought it might be someone planning a burglary. She watched while Raja dozed. When he woke, she told him. He realised at once that his terrorist friends had warned the police that he was a Muslim sympathiser. Perhaps they had made him out to be a Pakistani spy.

  For a moment, he thrilled at the idea of his importance, his dangerousness. He saw himself as fighting for the Hyder Alis, brandishing a sword, keeping the mob at bay. The very thought made him break into a sweat. His clothes, his bed were soaked. Left weak and trembling, he confessed to Bim that he was afraid.

  ‘What will they do if their house is attacked?’ he muttered. ‘Who will protect them? The police won’t do it—they’re afraid of the mob.’

  Bim tried to reassure him but he wanted to talk, not listen to her. He talked of Hyder Ali, of the Begum, of their daughter, the young girl Benazir. He asked Bim questions about her but Bim hardly knew her at all—she was a good deal younger, still at school, a pretty child with a round porcelain face, always clinging close to her mother like a young pigeon that still needs to be nourished.

  ‘She doesn’t come to school any more,’ Bim said, trying to find something to say. ‘None of the Muslim girls come any more.’

  ‘Her parents must be afraid to send her out of the house. I wish I could go and see her.’

  ‘Go and see her?’ Bim repeated, puzzled. ‘Why?’

  ‘I know I can’t—the doctor says everyone is to keep away from me. Damn this t.b. Damn it—why must I have t.b. now?’

  ‘The doctor says it could have been a tea-cup or a dirty towel—’

  ‘A dirty towel? A tea-cup?’ Raja cried, lifting his head from the pillow to glare at her. ‘When I ought to be out in the streets—fighting the mobs—saving Hyder Ali and Benazir—’

  ‘Oh God, Raja,’ moaned Bim, running for the thermometer. �
�Be quiet or your temperature will go up. It is all this worry—all this nonsense—’

  ‘Nonsense!’ he gasped at her, white and damp with rage. He wanted to roar at her, he was so outraged and so frustrated, but all he could manage was a gasp.

  ‘It’s making you worse,’ Bim cried angrily, mopping his face with a sponge and going to get a change of nightshirt for him. ‘How will you get better if you keep worrying about fighting in the streets? What fighting in the streets?’

  ‘Don’t you see—there is going to be fighting in the streets, people like Hyder Ali Sahib are going to be driven out, their property will be burnt and looted, the government is helpless, they’re not preventing—preventing—’ but now tears of weakness rose in his throat, flooding it, and he closed his mouth and turned his head from side to side like a dog tied to a tight leash.

  His situation was Romantic in the extreme, Bim could see as she sponged his face and helped him struggle out of one muslin shirt and into another—his heavy, limp body as she lifted it as spent and sapped as a bled fish, and the city of Delhi burning down about them. He hoped, like Byron, to go to the rescue of those in peril. Instead, like Byron, he lay ill, dying. Bim was sure he was dying. Her eyes streamed with tears as she buttoned up his shirt. ‘Shall I read to you, Raja?’ she asked with a brave gulp.

  ‘Shall I read to you, Raja?’

  Sometimes he nodded yes, sometimes he shook his head no.

  ‘No. Won’t you go up on the roof again, Bim, and see what’s happening?’

  ‘Here, on Bela Road?’ Bim asked in surprise, letting the book fall from her lap in surprise.

  ‘At the Hyder Alis’ of course,’ Raja explained with an irritated twitch.‘Go up and see.’

  Sometimes Bim grumbled but went, dragging her feet because she was tired and knew nothing was happening either on Bela Road or in the Hyder Alis’ garden, or in the Misras’ compound, or anywhere closer than the horizon where the city walls smouldered and smoked by day and blazed by night.

  Sometimes she was glad to leave the stuffy, airless sickroom with its stale, disinfected odours and Raja’s low spirits and her own headache, to stroll on the terrace for a while and see the river birds descending from the sky to settle on the sand dunes for the night with harsh, alarmed cries, or hang over the balustrade and search the quiet leafy gardens and walled compounds for some sign of life, or action, that she could report to Raja. A bicycle wobbled drunkenly out of the servants’ quarters at the back of the house and past the guava trees. A washerman was going in at the Misras’ gate with a neatly tied bundle of white washing on his head. A dog barked in the Hyder Alis’ garden. That was all. It was nothing.

  One day, less than nothing.

  ‘The house seems empty,’ she told Raja bluntly as she came down. ‘I think they’ve gone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Hyder Alis, of course,’ she said irritably, going straight to the dressing table where the medicines were lined up, for his evening dose.

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘I don’t know, Raja, I only went up on the terrace to see. The house is dark, and everything seems shut.’

  ‘But then—but then—go and find out,’ he cried in a kind of muffled scream. ‘Go and find out!’

  Bim gave him a dark look from over the brimming medicine spoon. ‘I will if you swallow this and stop screaming.’

  ‘I’m not screaming—I’m shouting!’ He gulped down the medicine and the hysteria in his voice with an effort. ‘But go. Go.’

  ‘I wish there was someone else who would go,’ Bim could not keep from saying as she swept out. ‘There is never anybody except me.’

  There was no one except Bim. Everything was left to her. Aunt Mira was strangely absent. To begin with, she used to come stumbling into Raja’s room and try ineffectually to tidy his books and medicines with shaking hands and ask tentatively about his meals, his temperature. Or she would huddle up in a cane chair on the veranda, just outside his door, saying to Bim ‘Call me when you need me. I’ll wait here for Tara.’

  Tara was always out now. Since their mother’s death, and Raja’s illness, she had taken to going to the Misras’ every evening and often they would take her to the cinema, to Connaught Place to shop, or to the Roshonara Club to play badminton and drink lemonade. They would bring her back in the family car quite punctually at whatever hour Aunt Mira had stipulated. Only now Aunt Mira seldom managed to stay up so long. For a while she would sit hunched on the cane chair, inspecting with narrowed eyes her cheesy, blue-nailed hands through which thick veins twisted like green worms, then begin to shiver and to mutter to herself as Bim watched her out of the corner of her eye from Raja’s bedside, and then she would be seen—and heard—to go stumbling down the veranda to her own room and vanish into her bed. Bim was perturbed but far too busy with Raja to think much about Aunt Mira. Sometimes, when she went into the dining room for dinner and found neither Tara nor her aunt at the table, their plates turned upside down and waiting on the tablecloth, she frowned and went down to Aunt Mira’s room to implore her to come and eat a little. The meals on the table did not look appealing but they had to be eaten all the same, Bim thought. But Aunt Mira, huddling under her blanket—why a blanket in the middle of summer? It was crazy—shook her head and smiled with her lower lip hanging loosely and gleaming wet in the dark. There was a strange smell in the closed, stuffy room. Bim wrinkled up her nose. She went and sat on the veranda, waiting up for Tara in place of her aunt.

  Baba sat there, on the veranda steps, beside a pot of petunias that flowered now in the dark with a kind of lunar luminosity, giving out a maidenly white scent that made one soon feel cooler, calmer. Baba’s presence, too, was so much less than a presence, that it could not intrude or chafe. He did not turn to Bim or speak. He had his handful of pebbles that Aunt Mira had given him years ago and with which he played perpetually so that they were quite smooth and round from use. Everyone in the household knew the sound they made as he scattered them across the tiles with a little, quiet unfolding gesture of his hand then gathered them ud again with that curiously remote and peaceful smile on his thin face. It was the sound of the house, as much as the contented muttering of the pigeons in the veranda. It gave time a continuity and regularity that the ticking of a clock in the hall might convey in other homes. Bim was at times grateful for it and at times irritated beyond endurance by it, just as one might be by the perpetual sameness of clock hands.

  ‘Tara’s late,’ Bim said to him, to herself, sighing.

  Baba smiled vaguely but not quite in her direction and jiggled the pebbles in his fist for a moment before he let them fall again. Bim had to set her jaw firmly to keep from rebuking him for the clatter. Leaning back in her broken basket chair, she kept her eyes on the gate at the end of the drive, worriedly. The street lamp shone on it without illuminating it, it was so dim and the air so dusty. She knew Tara could come to no harm—harm was beyond Tara’s childish capacity. Yet she was uneasy for unease was in the air like a swarm of germs, an incipient disease. The empty house across the road breathed it at them. Its emptiness and darkness was a warning, a threat perhaps.

  Bim wondered at Tara going again and again to visit the Misra sisters. All through their school years they had chafed at this too close relationship with girls they considered dull and conservative. But they were neighbours and so had had to cycle to school together—it was considered safer for four girls to bicycle together than for two groups of two girls—and sometimes do their homework together in the evenings or crawl through the hedge between the two gardens to borrow a book or get some sewing done by the many and useful aunts in the Misra household. Yet they had always regarded—or at least Bim had—the Misra girls as too boring to be cultivated. They had also been more than a little nervous of the Misra boys who had been merely rough and loud-mouthed as children but, when they grew older, with bristly jaws and swelling thighs and bellies, ran their eyes over the girls in a smiling, appraising way that made them shiver as
horses do when flies settle. When Bim finished with school and went to college, she was relieved that the Misra girls did not follow; they stayed home to help their mother and aunts with the housekeeping and await marriages to be arranged for them. Then Tara took to visiting them on her own, almost every evening. ‘D’you think I could have mother’s bracelet to wear, Bim?’ she would ask before leaving, or ‘Can I have your white Lucknow sari just for today, Bim? They’re taking me to the club.’

  When Tara did appear in the pool of green, insect-fretted light at the gate, she was not alone. Bim had known, in those bones that jarred every time Baba threw his pebbles across the tiles, that she would have someone with her when she came. Here he was.

  ‘This is Bakul,’ Tara told her in an almost inaudible murmur, turning their mother’s bracelet about her wrist, round and round and round. ‘The Misras—the Misras—’ she stammered, ‘took us to the Roshonara Club. There was a dance.’

  While she stammered and Bakul tried gallantly to help with some more polished and assured phrases that he slipped in with a self-assurance that filled in the gaps left by Tara and even propped up the little that she managed to say, coolly and powerfully, Aunt Mira came out of her room to stare. ‘This is my aunt,’ whispered Tara, dropping her eyes so as not to have to see the way Aunt Mira’s mouth twitched and a nerve jumped in her cheek, making her left eye flicker, and Bakul said at once ‘I came to ask if Tara may come to a party at my house tomorrow. My sisters are giving a party and the Misra girls are coming. They could bring Tara with them—with your permission.’ He actually made a little bow when he said this, and aunt and sister regarded him with astonishment that made the aunt’s face twitch and flicker and jerk and the sister’s face solidify into stone. They might have stared in this fashion if a young prince had ridden up on horseback to sweep Tara up onto the saddle and away. This wonderfully good-looking, well-groomed, well-spoken young man who had arrived on their doorstep with Tara was just such an apparition to them—unexpected, unsought, and yet exactly what they would have sought for Tara, expected for Tara if they had sought, or expected. Suddenly they did.