Last Labyrinth Read online

  A large room made up most of the cottage. It was pleasantly bright with the light of a petromax. At one end of the room sat a fair, rosy woman of about forty, reading an enormous book. She was dressed in white. She looked up as we came in, acknowledging the deferential greetings with a charming smile. I did not think I had seen such a warm and generous smile for a long long time. Anuradha went nearer and touched her feet.

  They did not introduce me to her. In fact, there was very little conversation. Anuradha and the young girl were the only ones to talk. They discussed a recent fair that the girl had been to. Aftab did not smoke but neither did he talk. The woman went back to her reading. Half an hour later, it seemed it was suddenly time to go. Everyone stood up as though they had heard a bell. There were the same respectful good byes and the same marvellous smile. The woman looked at me a long time as one might look at an old acquaintance.

  6

  The shares, what is happening to the shares? Mr. Thapar is not moving fast enough. Of course, he does not understand why, after a gap of six months, I have asked him to start buying again. ‘The prices are ridiculously high,’ he told me on telephone. ‘Why did you stop buying when they were reasonable?’ Why indeed? Why did I get humbugged? By Anuradha? By Aftab? By that woman, Gargi whom I had visited that night on the other bank of Ganga six months ago? Maybe, I am unfair to Gargi. She probably had nothing to do with all that happened. And, yet, it was in that cottage of hers that night, that I had first felt my will beginning to weaken, the will to capture Aftab’s company. Back at the haveli, squatting beside a hand pump, washing my face, the thought had crossed my mind for the first time: Is it worth the bother?

  Anuradha, holding her sari between the knees, laughed and pumped the ancient hand pump. The cold water soaked through my hair, ran down my face, dripped into the collar of my shirt. Anuradha handed me a towel. She watched me as I dried myself. From the direction of the Blue Room came the sound of a sarangi being tuned.

  ‘So we are going to have a concert now, are we?’ I said.

  ‘Aftab likes to entertain his guests.’

  ‘I hope I shall get a few minutes after the concert to talk to him about those shares,’ I said half-heartedly.

  Anuradha smiled. ‘I can get you a kurta of Aftab’s if you want.’

  ‘Not just now.’

  Anuradha introduced me to Azizun and her niece, a girl of thirteen or fourteen. (Were they, too, a part of the conspiracy?) I had met Azizun on arrival but I had yet to hear her speak. She smiled at everybody and salaamed me, which took me by surprise. It was a moment before I could reply with a clumsy wave of the hand. She was dressed in the same garara. She sat on a carpet, her legs to one side, straight-backed, silent. Once again, in that dark room, I was struck by the singular phosphorescence of her face, her teeth, her dress. For all the precision of her art she had a vagueness about her that spoke of a child’s mind that had been stunted by the despair of the grown-ups, even though the body matured and learnt to participate in the pleasures of the world. ‘Anuradha is my brains; Azizun, ah! Azizun is the song,’ declared Aftab suddenly, as though adding to Azizun’s introduction. He and Anuradha now slid down from the divan. They sat facing me, all three of them, looking at me, weighing me. Azizun had coarse features. Her fair skin seemed more bloodless than ever. Aftab had brought with him a scent of flowers. He was dressed in a silk kurta and churidars. But those simple clothes created an effect of opulence that I did not understand. In the darkness of the room he had an imposing presence. He might indeed have been a prince. On his little toe, incredibly, he wore a diamond ring. And now that I was seeing him for the first time without his western clothes, I realized how small, soft and delicate, he actually was. In a slow, graceful movement he leaned forward and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘He is handsome, isn’t he?’ he said to Anuradha, as though admiring a child. Anuradha looked at me, her black eyes sparkling. It seemed as though she, too, had asked a question and waited for the reply. In fact, they had the air not so much of hosts as of inquisitors. What was I to make of them, a dumb-looking singing girl, a goggled ex-nawab? I felt silly and isolated. ‘Well?’ I said, looking at each face in turn.

  They seemed not to hear me. Nor did they talk among themselves. ‘You live in a disaster area of life,’ old Leela Sabnis used to say. To me my habitat had always seemed natural. Sitting there, though, watching the trio against the maroon draperies I thought maybe here were lives free of disaster, unless it came in the guise of a businessman grabbing their company. I felt bad I had not been able to find a more painless point of contact with them.

  Anuradha offered the silver cigarette-box to Aftab and, then, to me. I picked one of those ‘delicious’ hand-rolled cigarettes.

  Was this maroon Blue Room a part of the labyrinth, too? If so, what was I doing here amidst these strangers? If someone, man or god, had watched my life from a great height, would I have appeared to him like an ant threading through a maze, knocking about, against one wall, then another? Were there spirits buried in these walls, deep down in forlorn dungeons? My mother believed in spirits. So probably did these people. If only one knew! If only miracles were to take place, as of old, and one could suddenly, irrefutably, know. Without nagging, enervating doubts. I want. I want. If only one knew what one wanted. Or, maybe, to know was what I wanted. To know. Just that. No more. No less. This, then, was a labyrinth, too, this going forward and backward and sideways of the mind. I felt again the faint stirrings of a curiosity that I had first felt near the marble sarcophagus, a secret curiosity that I dare not share with another.

  And who were these people — friendly yet remote — radiating an aura that was sensual at one moment and faintly menacing the next and something else altogether the next? Behind them, in the long tunnel of darkness, a flicker of light, like the sparks of a firefly, flashed occasionally. Gradually, the sparks increased, changed colour. From gold to red and green and violet. The flickers combined to form shapes, then uncoupled and formed other shapes. The shapes, too, coupled and uncoupled until the whole space was filled with dancing, writhing sparks. Some remote part of me had come alive. Those were excellent cigarettes.

  Sometime later — I don’t know how much later — Azizun was singing. Each word, each phrase, came through distinctly, like freshly poured type. I could see each word being moulded by her lips. I watched its flight as it travelled a little distance and fell in its destined place, there among the Persian carpets.

  They were sad songs, all of them, sung with great sorrow, until one felt that life itself was somehow fatalistically tied down by them, that life offered no possibilities aside from those delineated by these songs, that all struggle was futile. Floating about the dark air, they carried with them their particular dementia, their frightening power to push men into despair, from despair to decadence and, thence, into madness and death. I knew I had heard those songs before.

  Old Leela, too, was crazy for music. She had a great collection of records. Music always turned her on: Rock, and hard rock, and soul and, of course, the Beatles. ‘The drums, the guitars, the voices,’ she used to say, ‘set some bit or the other of me vibrating, just as the tantrik rituals do.’

  ‘What do the tantrik rituals do?’ I had asked. Leela was a scholar and she explained but she did not much care for them. Descartes and tantras did not mix.

  Azizun sang on, unaware to all appearances, of the beauty of the songs or of her own voice. It was husky, a little nasal, and it reminded you of that core of loneliness around which all of us are built. It might have emerged from the slums of Benaras but centuries had gone into its perfection. It rode the night like a searchlight, lighting up the ruins of an ancient abandoned city with which I, too, was familiar. All my life, at intervals, I, too, had flown across its blacked out skies, flapping my weary wings, not able, for all the striving, to chart a course. This city, at least, we had in common, Azizun and I. And, through Azizun, I shared it with the other two, who sat at once intent and lost, in a cloud of ciga
rette smoke. I could see, with sudden and unparalleled lucidity, that our difference apart, shares or no shares, we belonged to the same benighted underside of the world.

  It were Azizun’s songs, therefore, that made me drop my guard — for where was the question of guards among fellow creatures of the night — so that, later, when Aftab said to me, ‘Bhaskar, stay with us, don’t go back to the hotel,’ I agreed. They had me, I suppose, where they had wanted me all along.

  Still later, the girl was dancing, a mere child, thin and wispy in her costume of kathak dancer. Her little feet, so like a pair of pink birds, played with the smooth floor. The ghunghrus mingled with the wail of the sarangi, kept beat with the tablas. Her eyes, the neck, the full mouth and the little hands, gesticulated, suggested, built up, gesture by gesture, beat by beat, a little sensuous fire. It was stoked, this handful of embers by the music and Azizun, and by the girl herself and the long hand-rolled cigarettes. Gradually, it was stoked into a raging fire. The fire raged even when the music and the dance came to a crashing end. There was applause. The girl went to Aftab who kissed her hair and her throat and held her tiny waist in his two hands, as one might hold a lover’s. Then, they were gone, Aftab and the child. A little later, Azizun went away with the musicians. Besides the ornate lamp, the silver box between us, Anuradha and I stared at each other.

  ‘I am stoned,’ I said.

  She smiled, then, laughed. ‘So am I,’ said she.

  I kissed her hand, her arm, breathing in great gulps, her strange perfume.

  She smiled. The solitaire glittered in the dim light. She took my face in her hands, looked down at me from the divan.

  ‘Yes, very handsome,’ she said as though she appraised a photograph.

  ‘Where do you get this fancy perfume?’ I asked her.

  ‘From Lucknow. Why?’

  ‘It is marvellous but terribly sad-making.’

  ‘You are a sad man.’

  ‘Nobody has ever called me sad,’ I laughed.

  She continued to look at me in silence, then, ‘Why do you want to get mixed up with riff-raff like us?’ she said.

  ‘I like you very much.’

  ‘You don’t have to say that.’

  ‘I mean it.’

  ‘Let me show you to your room,’ she said, standing up, letting go of me.

  I sat on a bed, in a room bright with coloured lights. The light came from behind the stained glass panes of the ventilators. The intensity of light rose and fell. The room had a cement floor of dark red and smudgy walls. An old ceiling fan turned slowly creaking every time at the same point.

  ‘It is not very comfortable,’ Anuradha said. She got ready to leave and I panicked.

  ‘Don’t go away,’ I cried. ‘Not just now.’

  ‘I have to go. It is late.’

  ‘Sit down. I’ll tell you a story.’

  She hesitated, then sat down on the edge of the bed. It struck me that, maybe, she wasn’t in a hurry to go anywhere, that she was neither sleepy nor was there anyone waiting for her.

  ‘Well, what is the story?’

  ‘You know, I met you twenty years ago. In a little house by a forest. Twenty years ago.’

  I fell silent.

  ‘Is that all? Is that the story?’

  I told her of the headmaster’s wife and the mehndi on her hands.

  ‘That was the first thing I noticed about you.’

  ‘That is not very flattering!’

  ‘We all have our hang-ups. Do you still have mehndi on your palms?’

  I took her hands. There was no trace of mehndi there.

  ‘Where is she now? Your headmaster’s wife.’

  ‘They migrated to Canada. I never saw her again.’

  ‘K says your mother died of cancer.’

  ‘Cancer and Krishna.’

  ‘Krishna?’

  ‘The God. My mother believed Krishna would cure her and flushed her capsules down the toilet. Krishna sat on top of her bureau and smiled and smiled, and smiled until she was dead.’

  The coloured panes flared up again.

  ‘Why do the lights behind those ventilators go up and down?’

  ‘There is a house there that the owner rents out for marriages.’

  The flare was followed by a new darkness.

  ‘Do you believe in miracles?’ I asked her.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You believe in God?’

  ‘I used to think of Krishna a lot.’

  ‘So did my mother. So does Geeta.’

  ‘Most women do.’

  ‘But Krishna never comes,’ I couldn’t help mocking.

  ‘That is true,’ said Anuradha absently. ‘Krishna never comes.’

  There was a silence, as though Krishna was what we had met to discuss. Once again, I was afraid she would leave. I wanted to hold her as long as possible.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Hasn’t Mr. Thapar told you?’

  ‘He did not know.’

  ‘He will find out some day. He is like a weasel, always digging up people’s pasts. I am more scared of him than I am of you.’

  I was greatly moved by what she had said.

  ‘Don’t be scared of me. Please.’

  I tried to kiss her but she moved away, annoyed.

  Beside the bed lay a fine carpet which I just seemed to notice. Its colours, enriched in the coloured glow, floated up against the red floor. A peacock, its tail unfurled, stood woven into it. I could see his beige claws and pink eyes and circles of emerald and ruby and cobalt on its plume. On his belly lay the copper ash-tray into which we had been dropping our cigarette butts. To the little heap Anuradha now added another and turned to me. It might have been a trick of the lighting but she looked much older, older than me and Aftab, not so much physically as by her demeanour, by the look in her eyes. It was as though she had been gifted with a special vision, a vantage point high above the earth, from where she could see the melee below as ordinary men could not. And it was as though the vision always left her sadder, taking away from her the hope and the laughter with which she had been born. I knew I wanted her.

  ‘It is not me you want,’ she said quietly, startling me with the suddenness of her remark.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I know. You want something. You badly want something. I could see that the first time we met. But it is not me. That, too, I can see. I told you so in the dargah.’

  It was my turn to be annoyed.

  ‘O.K.,’ I said. ‘O.K. Forget it. You aren’t going to make a difference anyway.’

  ‘Don’t be angry,’ she said.

  She looked distressed, in a way, guilty.

  I jumped off the bed feeling a new lightness of body and mind. I walked to the window in my socks and flung it open. The cool air refreshed me. The room was at the very edge of the haveli. To the left of me, twenty feet away, ran a boundary wall of mossy old bricks. On the other side stood the house, which was rented to wedding parties. It was a single storeyed structure with a large verandah in the front. The verandah was deserted except for an old man and odd bits of furniture that lay scattered about, like sets on a stage. In one corner of the verandah, on an iron pole, hung a fierce gaslight. There were similar poles in the other three corners. They probably hung gaslights on the other poles as well whenever a wedding took place. To the right of me lay the large decrepit garden, the ghostly peepul in its centre.

  I breathed deeply, taking in the fresh, cool air. I was disgusted with them, with myself, with those dissolute cigarettes whose perfume clung to my fingers. I was disgusted with letting myself be touched by their decadence. I felt dirty and bitter. I knew I should have gone back to the hotel. I was, of course, obsessed with her, just as I had been obsessed with all those other women. The one-shot obsession. It had been different with Geeta but that too had not exactly been a resounding success. I would be glad when morning came and I was off.

  At that hour, the grounds of Aftab’s haveli looked
like the wilderness that surrounds abandoned tombs. The peepul reminded me of that other peepul across the river. I heard her move behind me, the silk of her sari rustling against her thighs. I did not turn when she came and stood by my side.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘who was that woman we went to meet across the river?’

  ‘You mean Gargi?’

  ‘Who is she? I thought I had met her somewhere.’

  ‘You could not have!’

  ‘Who is she, anyway?’

  ‘Her father was a sufi, a pir. He lived with Aftab’s father. He gave Aftab whatever sight he has.’

  ‘He was blind, was he?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘Where did he come from?’ Once again, against my will, I was drawn helplessly into the labyrinth of their mysterious world.

  ‘The pir?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t know, I never met him. Before he became a pir, they say, he was the prince of a small state. He ran away from home, took to drink. Even now you meet people who say they saw him drunk in the streets of Benaras. “When I am drunk,” he would say, “when I am drunk Allah comes to me, stares at me but says nothing. So I drink the more. One day He will speak to me.” ’

  Anuradha fell silent. We stared at the moon-washed garden.

  ‘Then?’

  ‘He fell ill, burnt with drink. “God does not exist,” he now told people. “If he exists let Him give me a sign.” His father sat by him day and night. One evening, the ceremony of the final parting was conducted between the father and the son. That night, it is said, the father had a dream. A dervish told him to give up what he loved most and God will restore his son. In the morning, the father called the mullah and his wife and he went around his son’s bed three times and prayed to God that his life may please be taken and his son’s spared. The next day he fell ill. His son gradually recovered. On his deathbed the father called his son and told him, “You had asked for a sign. God has given it to you.” The son got well, disappeared for a few years. When he returned Aftab’s father persuaded him to live with him.’