Leela's Book (24 page)

The Professor and his mother were among the last guests to leave the wedding grounds, and Humayun one of the last drivers. They weren’t staying out of choice, but because they were waiting anxiously for Bharati. The Professor and his mother hadn’t seen Bharati all evening; but still they insisted on waiting. ‘Where is she?’ the Professor asked Humayun in some annoyance, as if he was supposed to know her whereabouts. ‘Haven’t you seen her?’ Humayun shook his head, and the Professor said brusquely, ‘Wait outside then, till we call you’, and Humayun returned to the fire where he had sat with the other drivers earlier in the evening and waited there on his own, thinking about Aisha.

At first the other drivers, all Hindus, had welcomed Humayun into their circle – despite the fact that he was so different from them in his mood and preoccupations. Their festival of Diwali was in a few days’ time, and they were eager that evening for what they called some ‘seasonal’ gambling. As soon as it was dark, one of the men took out a pack of cards. Somebody else produced the dice. A third man even pulled out a bottle of hooch, and it was passed, somewhat surreptitiously, around the circle. Humayun, the only Muslim, refused all of these things. He had never gambled and he didn’t want to drink. But the other men remained friendly. They asked about his employment, where he lived, and how he came to be at the wedding. He told them about his temporary work for the Professor this evening, driving his family to and from the wedding. ‘My betrothed works in his house, looking after the Professor’s mother,’ Humayun said. It was a quiet boast, and they all murmured in admiration.

After they had been fed what remained of the wedding dinner, several of the drivers drank more hooch and became wilder in their gambling. Then an old man lost a hundred rupees, and he cursed his opponent for taking away his earnings, and the Diwali presents he was going to buy his granddaughters, and got to his feet to move away before anything worse could happen. The mood changed; somebody spoke of how the Muslim taxi drivers were taking their custom this Diwali – they worked right through the holiday for inflated rates, regardless of neighbourly feeling. Things got even more heated when somebody mentioned the Ram temple: ‘The government should build it quickly, now that our people have got rid of the mosque Emperor Babur put up over Lord Ram’s birthplace!’ ‘Sister-fucking Muslims, saying that this is their land too. How dare they?’ said an older driver. One of the younger men made undulating curves in the air with his hands. ‘They’re jealous of our women. We have goddess Sita, Ram’s wife, so beautiful. Who do they have to compare with her?’ ‘Their women sleep with any passing man,’ cut in a thin man in a blue shirt and trousers. ‘That’s why they have so many children. Putting them in burqas is just a joke.’ He looked up at Humayun as he spoke.

Humayun got to his feet reluctantly. They were trying to provoke him. ‘What you say is dishonourable,’ he said slowly.

The card playing stopped. The firelight picked out the eagerness on their faces. They wanted a fight. ‘Dishonourable?’ It was the thin man in the blue shirt who spoke. ‘Name me one virtuous Muslim woman.’

‘The one I am going to marry.’ The instant he said it, Humayun regretted his boast. The circle of men looked at each other and laughed.

Before anything worse could happen, Humayun moved away from the fire. He sat at the top of the lane in the Professor’s car, occasionally glancing out at the departing wedding guests, their women in opulent silk saris, blues, greens, purples, leaving the wedding garden and returning to Delhi. He wished for such a sari for his Aisha. He would buy her one when they were married. Sitting there, he closed his eyes and felt another twinge of worry: about what they had done today in his room, about what he had done to her. He must announce their engagement to both their mothers immediately.

After some time, Humayun heard the clamour of the wedding couple departing. He got out of the car and walked a little way down the lane, from where he could see the Professor’s son leaving on the start of his nuptial journey, driven away with his wife in a white car covered with red roses. One by one, each party from the bride’s large family began to disperse also. Soon, all the gambling drivers had left the fire, and all the dark shapes of the cars that had lined the road leading up to the Flying Club lit up, reversed, and disappeared along the lane like fireflies in the night. Humayun was now the only driver left.

Since it was cold in the car, he returned to the fire, and was sitting there, dozing, when he heard somebody calling his name. It was the Professor. ‘We must leave,’ the Professor said. He seemed agitated. ‘My mother is too old to wait any longer.’

While the Professor went back into the garden to collect his mother, Humayun hurried along the lane to the place where he had left the car beside the Flying Club tennis court. He was opening the door when he heard a taxi in the lane ahead coming towards him from the city. It slowed down when it caught Humayun in its headlights, and stopped when it drew level. A window opened slowly. Humayun heard the voice speaking before he saw the face.

‘I just dropped a guest in Nizamuddin,’ the voice said, ‘and I’ve come back to collect the pandit. I have to tell you something. I’ve seen a Muslim girl at the Professor’s house where your betrothed works, being taken by another man. Chaturvedi is the name, isn’t it? In a tall house just opposite the nala?’

It was the thin man in the blue shirt, the one who earlier this evening had spoken disrespectfully of Muslim women. Humayun tried to reason with himself; surely the man was mocking him? But the tremor in the driver’s voice could come from nothing but fear or pity.

The driver spoke again: ‘She was wearing a yellow suit of clothes, wasn’t she? You’d better hurry back and find her.’

‘Who was it who attacked her?’ Humayun said.

But the window slid upwards, and the car accelerated away towards the entrance of the Flying Club. Humayun’s hands trembled as he tried to fit the key into the ignition. He saw the thin man get out, walk quickly into the wedding grounds, and shout something through the jasmine archway. The Professor and his mother were just coming out. Nobody spoke during the short drive home.

When they reached the Professor’s house, the front door was ajar. ‘Aisha,’ said Humayun. He leapt out of the car, instead of hastening over to help the Professor’s mother as he should have done. ‘Aisha,’ he shouted as he ran up the steps.

The Professor’s house was in near darkness; one light was on in the kitchen and another in the hallway. Humayun almost skidded on the clay waterpot, which was in pieces on the floor.

He ran up the stairs, calling Aisha’s name, turning on lights, opening the door into bedrooms and bathrooms, and eventually reaching the library on the top floor, where the Professor kept his books. The bookshelves loomed up aggressively like well-trained soldiers. In the centre of the room, Humayun turned on the desk lamp and crouched down to look under the table. He even unbolted the door to the veranda and walked round the terrace, looking over the wall and down into the garden.

When he ran back downstairs, the Professor was standing in the hall.

‘What are you doing?’ the Professor said. ‘Where is Aisha?’ His voice was low and angry. ‘What the hell are you both up to?’

‘She promised she would wait here until Mrs Ahmed came to collect her,’ Humayun said.

‘She broke my mother’s vase!’ the Professor said. ‘It’s lucky that nobody walked in through the open door and took the rest. Aisha is young and clumsy and distracted. Go and look for her at that other place she works and tell her not to come back here.’

Humayun didn’t reply. But as he walked away towards the front door, the Professor called after him. ‘Take this,’ he said. Humayun turned, and saw that he was holding out an envelope. It was his pay for the evening.

Humayun pushed the envelope into his pocket and ran up the drain road towards the basti to look for Aisha at the graveyard, thinking over what the Hindu driver had said as he ran, and asking himself if he had been guilty of lust. It was because of his own dirty thoughts about the Professor’s daughter that he had forced himself on Aisha before they were married, made her late for work at the Professor’s, failed to make proper arrangements to collect her after the wedding – and even trusted flighty Mrs Ahmed when she promised solemnly to fetch the girl herself as soon as it got dark. If what the driver said was true, then it was his fault. It was just as his mother had said – Humayun clenched his fists together as he ran – men were the cause of all the world’s sorrow.

He had almost reached the gateway that led down to the drain, when he heard the shouting in the lane ahead, and smelt the burning. ‘What’s happened?’ he called to a group of people who were standing under the trees near the drain. During the day, the waste collectors’ wives sat here weighing beer bottles, Old Monk and Royal Challenge whisky bottles, mango pickle jars, English and Hindi newspapers, and all kinds of slop-stained plastics. A man in a blackened shirt, holding a baby, turned towards Humayun. ‘Can’t you see? The kabari settlement caught fire. The fire spread into the next gully. The wind was coming from across the drain, and we thought the whole basti might catch, but thanks to God it has only affected twenty or thirty houses. We’ve managed to contain it.’

‘Is anybody dead?’

‘One young girl, maybe two, died in the smoke. Also, a baby from the other side of the basti. Many people have taken refuge in the shrine. The bodies have been taken to the police station.’

‘Which young girls?’

The man’s baby woke up and began crying, and he turned away from Humayun and handed the child to his wife.

‘Which young girls?’ Humayun repeated, shouting now. ‘What were their names?’

The man looked up again. ‘Our house is full of smoke,’ he said, ‘my children are crying from fear and cold. I don’t know the girls’ names. Go and ask for yourself at the police station.’

Humayun hesitated a moment, and then he ran – pushing through the crowds of men who stood in the street discussing the burning with dismayed but resigned expressions – choking and coughing on the smoke as he skirted the edge of the basti in the direction of the main road.

At the corner of the basti market, scared anew by the thought of approaching the police station alone on a night like this, he called out to the carpenter who was sitting on a bench outside his workshop, dangling a grandchild on his knee and watching sceptically as his son planed the top of a table. ‘Did you see the girls who died in the fire? What were they wearing? Was one of them in yellow?’

The carpenter, a big man, looked up and shrugged. ‘Yellow?’ He looked over at his son. ‘Was one of them in yellow? Yes, maybe she was. But you should go and—’

Humayun, however, hadn’t stayed to hear any more.

By the time he arrived at the thana he was breathless. The police station was beyond the market, on the outside edge of Nizamuddin, in the armpit of the two main roads which ran along the colony’s northern and eastern edge, and was set back from both, in its own garden. After the noise and fear in the basti, the place was oddly quiet.

Humayun walked up the driveway and climbed the steps to the door. As he stood there, getting his breath back, he had another moment of hesitation. Nobody he knew would ever willingly go to the Hindu officers of Nizamuddin police station for help. Then he thought of Aisha – raped or dead or dying – and put out a hand and knocked. The worst they could do was to send him away without an answer.

A tall policeman with a large paunch answered the door. He was speaking to a colleague about a particular chicken dish: ‘No onion, no garlic, only coconut. Fried in ghee with a
little tiny
pinch of poppy seeds. Yes?’ he asked, looking down at Humayun.

As politely as he could, Humayun explained that he had lost his cousin; that he was concerned that she had been harmed in the fire; could they confirm that none of the recently deceased was named Aisha?

The policeman opened the door wider, and pointed to a long wooden bench by the entrance where Humayun should sit and wait, opposite a desk where another policeman sat making notes in a large register. He called through to the room beyond: ‘It’s fried hard till the skin pops. A special Bengali trick. My sister-in-law does it’ – and from a nearby room, three other male voices burst out laughing. The chicken-loving policeman turned to face Humayun: ‘What did you say her name was?’

‘Aisha,’ repeated Humayun.

‘Aisha.’

There was a sudden silence. The policeman at the desk looked up from his writing. ‘And your name?’

‘Humayun.’

Again the policemen looked at each other, and the fear entered Humayun and made him grip the bench with both hands for reassurance.

‘Do you know what happened to a girl called Aisha this evening?’ the man at the desk asked eventually.

Humayun opened his hands to show he knew nothing, not being able or willing or inclined to ask these men about the other thing that might have happened to her. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I hope she has not been caught in the fire.’ He didn’t want to hear these men talk about Aisha; it would make him go mad.

But a third policeman, sitting in an inner room, got to his feet and came to the door. ‘Something much worse for a woman’s reputation than that.’

The policemen looked between each other again; and the man at the desk nodded.

The chicken-loving policeman stepped forward, leaning over him so close that Humayun could feel his warm breath. ‘Is that mud on your trousers?’ the policeman asked, and he took a pinch of the material on Humayun’s thigh between thumb and forefinger. Humayun glanced down at the mark. ‘It’s ash from the fire,’ he explained.

The chicken-loving policeman cuffed him round the head. ‘Sister-fucker, it’s mud,’ he said. ‘Have you been involved in a struggle?’

‘A struggle? No, sir.’

‘Are you married?’

‘Married?’

‘Have you had carnal relations?’

‘Sir?’

And Humayun heard the man at the desk say in a tired voice. ‘Take him out of my sight. The interrogation room.’