Last Labyrinth Read online

  ‘Somebody has been stabbed,’ I shouted to Aftab. What with the heat, I wanted to be sick.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Stabbed.’

  ‘Oh, God.’

  The crowd grew by the second. There was no sign either of a policeman or a doctor. The smoke grew thicker, the radios louder. And, now, Aftab put a trembling hand on my arm. ‘Is he dead?’ he asked in a voice shaken with panic, his hand damp against my arm.

  ‘I don’t think he is dead — yet.’ At that moment, they started to put him in the back of a tonga. Aftab was now looking down, his vertigo forgotten.

  ‘They are putting the poor bastard in a tonga! The jogging is not going to help his pain.’

  Aftab still clutched my arm but there was a new fascination in his voice that went beyond the usual fascination that attracts people to an accident. For a long moment, he stood riveted to the spot, one hand on my arm, the other clutching the rotting bannister.

  ‘Let us go in,’ he said finally when the tonga had disappeared.

  We entered now the room in which the dance practice was still going on. Azizun sat, her legs to one side, singing. Beside her, sat the pair of musicians whom I had seen in Aftab’s haveli the other night. An old fan churned the hot air overhead. The two girls, Azizun’s pupils, were dressed in churidars and frock. The frocks might have been part of a school uniform. They were not more than ten or eleven. I wondered where Aftab’s young lover was, the girl who had danced at the haveli that night. The girls did not look up as we entered. Azizun smiled brightly, her fine teeth very white between the coarse lips, then went back to her singing. We sat down on a threadbare carpet that had been spread along a wall. It was a shabby little place but the activity of the children relieved it. I did not know much about dance but I knew they were good at whatever they were doing. You could see this on their faces and on the faces of their teachers. The girls did not either have the upper garments of a kathak dancer or did not want to spoil what they had. Their frocks, made of thin cotton, ballooned as they twirled about. Their arms were slender, perhaps, undernourished. Once of them, I now understood was Radha, the other Krishna. So, here too Krishna ruled. Why couldn’t they put into dance the problems of people like me? Weren’t there masters who could work out the choreography of my lust for Anuradha unless they considered the love of Radha and Krishna to include all loves, all lusts, all disappointments. The girls now moved into an intricate spell of footwork. It lasted a long time, their feet hollow and sharp by turn on the cement floor. How could anyone go through those manoeuvres on half-rations. Aftab slept, a cigarette dangling from his lips. The footwork had gone awry and Azizun cut in. The girls stopped. They were disappointed. Perspiration poured down their small oval faces. Again they began, getting derailed even sooner. They wiped their faces with the ends of their frocks. They looked unhappy, angry with themselves. They were exhausted and breathless. They probably needed rest. Why were they doing what they were doing? My daily expenses were perhaps more than what was spent on them in a month. Was it this gap that they hoped to bridge with their footwork? What gap could you bridge on an empty stomach, anyway? The well-fed will never be beaten by the hungry, old Leela used to say, unless hunger itself became the weapon. They started again. Maybe it was something else that drove them, some other hunger, more powerful than the hunger of the body, something closer to the kind of hunger I suffered from. If they did, they were certainly showing greater perseverance than I had.

  The music ended and, with its end, noises of the street fl owed freely into the little room. The shouting and the screaming seemed all the more insane because I did not think anything was getting done down there. The noise of radios and whirling tonga-wheels dominated all, as if a chariot race was on. From a distance came reports of firecrackers as a groom, perhaps, set out for his bride. Somewhere close by a conch was blown, over and over.

  Azizun brought in a tray of some sherbet with dirty looking ice. She sat around, shy and silent, while we sipped at it. It was too sweet and fuelled my nausea but I dared not leave it for the fear of upsetting her. In her own little home, with her mutilated mother, she appeared much more defenceless than I had given her credit for. In the bright light of the room, her mouth and eyes showed their vulnerability. She wore a garara of light blue linen. Her dupatta climbed continually to her throat revealing the fullness of her bosom. She was younger than I had thought.

  The girls came back. They had powdered their dark faces and one of them carried a doll against her talcumed cheeks. Aftab got up and went out of the door, probably to the toilet.

  ‘You have a nice house,’ I said to Azizun by way of small talk.

  ‘All these houses belong to Seth Sahib.’ She waved in the direction of the street.

  ‘What Seth Sahib? Aftab?’

  ‘Yes. His father had them built. We have lived here a long time. Gargi Mata lives upstairs. Have you met her?’

  I tried to place the name.

  ‘She is the daughter of the sufi .’

  I got it now.

  ‘I have seen her,’ I said.

  So it wasn’t a cock-and-bull story after all.

  ‘You have a room at the haveli?’ I asked her.

  ‘Yes. I stay the night there whenever I am required.’

  ‘Has he bought you?’ I asked foolishly, irritably.

  I was annoyed with Aftab for having brought me out on this excursion.

  ‘He treats you like a slave?’ I persisted.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Of course he does. Before you it was Anuradha. I suppose he treated her like a slave too.’

  She looked horrified. ‘He worships her,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  Azizun shut up. The girls watched us wondering, probably, what a strange quarrelsome man was visiting them.

  ‘He worships Anuradha?’ I asked.

  She nodded gravely and something about her manner made me wonder if she meant it literally.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  In reply she pointed towards the fan.

  ‘The fan?’

  She burst out laughing. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. Can I sing for you?’

  ‘I like your singing very much but first tell me: Who is Anuradha, anyway?’

  Azizun’s reaction was not one that I might have expected from one of Anuradha’s rivals. She was distinctly deferential, awed, as if I had asked her to inform on a great personage. It was almost as bad as if I had said, ‘Who the hell is Krishna?’

  She started to say something when Aftab entered.

  ‘While we are here let us go and meet Gargi,’ he said, with uncharacteristic briskness. He bade Azizun a quick salaam. I, too, said my good bye.

  The girls watched us shyly, the younger chewed the doll’s hair. I patted their little dark heads telling them to ‘keep it up’. When we stepped out on the landing, I said to Aftab, ‘I really admire the perseverance of those girls.’

  ‘I know you admire that sort of thing,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  As we climbed the next flight of steps, Aftab turned conspiratorial, paused every few steps, and amidst the odour of bats and beetle-spit, asked me if I had heard of Gargi. I said I had, sort of. I reminded him of the trip across the Ganga. He shook his head, as if he had a headache — which, indeed, he might have had considering that my own head was splitting — but explained nothing besides adding with a wry smile, ‘This, too, is a labyrinth, my friend.’

  There was a door with a sign in vermilion on one side of it. After a moment it was opened by Gargi. I recognized her. She gave us the same radiant smile and let us in.

  Gargi led us into a squarish room. Its stained glass ventilators were surprisingly like the ones at Aftab’s haveli. The room was bare except for a pitcher and mats along one corner. A young girl — the one who had held the lantern for the mallah — brought us glasses of cold water from the pitcher. As soon as we were seated, Aftab broke into a
spate of words. He sounded like a sullen schoolboy but Gargi listened to him with attention. Occasionally, she smiled or gestured. She had the most gentle and engaging smile of anybody I had ever known. I wanted to hug her when she smiled. Aftab talked of so many things at once that I could not make out what bothered him the most. It was all grief, of one kind or another, how his business was going downhill, and Azizun was not keeping well, and the haveli an the care were crumbling down. There was none of the reserve that I had always associated with him. He told her of the stabbing that had occurred in the street below. The tenants were bothering him, he said, but he avoided them for the fear that he too might be stabbed. Gargi looked at him reprimandingly. Then he started to talk about me: ‘a great businessman from Bombay’, etc. He mentioned how my touch could turn mud into gold and how happy I must be to have no problems in life. Gargi gave me a knowing smile.

  ‘The problem lies in the stars,’ said Aftab. ‘We become what our stars make us.’ Gargi raised her eyebrows heavenwards in mock commiseration but didn’t say a word. I had not yet heard her speak.

  There was some kind of a bond between Gargi and Aftab and I wondered what it was. Gargi, of course, was the daughter of the sufi, but was that all? In any event, there was a great deal of affection between the two, the kind that exists between a sister and a brother.

  I sat with my back to the door and it was her perfume that I first recognized. I stiffened, my heart beating a little wilder, my throat dry but I did not turn to look at her. It might have been a one-shot obsession but at that moment, while she hesitated at the doorstep, I knew I was in love with her. Gargi was looking at her over my head and Anuradha moved now — softly. She did not have her usual high heels. She touched Gargi’s feet and sat down next to me. ‘I did not know your were in Benaras,’ she said.

  ‘Well, here I am.’

  She smiled, composed, fully in control. Aftab, who had taken no notice of her, now started to speak again. Gargi let him talk without interruption although her face easily reflected her reaction if there was something to react to. At one point she took a pad and a pencil from under the mat, wrote something on it and passed it on to Anuradha. I wondered if she was under a vow of silence. And, then, suddenly, it struck me that Gargi was a deaf-mute. I had no doubt in my mind, no second thoughts. I had no doubts because I had seen her before, walking silently about the darkness of my dreams. That is why, entering the room, I had felt at home with her. And, I was positive she knew me, too. She understands, I said to myself, the only one who understands. And, was it this flat of Gargi’s and not the fan, that Azizun had indicated when we were talking of Anuradha? Did Aftab really worship Anuradha? I looked at the two of them with a new curiosity.

  In her note she had asked Anuradha to bring me some khir which Anuradha now did. In spite of my nausea I ate it. Everyone fell silent and watched me eat. It was as though a delinquent son, hungry and worn, had returned home. When I was finished with the first helping, Anuradha brought me another. I finished half of it. Then set it down. ‘I feel very full,’ I said apologetically. ‘I shouldn’t have accepted it.’

  Gargi smiled. I wondered if she could read my lips well enough. I added more slowly, ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘Never mind,’ Anuradha said, ‘I shall finish it.’

  She ate slowly and, as she always did, with a peculiar concentration. Occasionally, she glanced up, keeping track of the conversation. I talked to Gargi, telling her of how good the khir was, and how my mother made sweets at home when I was a boy. I told her about how she developed cancer, preferred Krishna to medicines, and died. I told her about my father, his preoccupation towards the end. I talked carefully, modulating my lips. I was very keen that Gargi should understand me. And then, suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, I became aware of the charge that had gradually built up between me and Anuradha. It was like the exchange that had occurred in the dargah and then, again, in the Blue Room. This time, I knew, it had something to do with the act of sharing that bit of khir. I stumbled to a stop, my words choked off by a rush of emotion. I stared into Anuradha’s eyes. One moment there was puzzlement in the brown irises, then they were filled with understanding and finally with confusion. Blood rose to her face. She emptied the bowl and put it down. I looked around. Gargi was smiling at me as before, waiting for me to continue. But I was certain she had understood everything. She had understood not only what had happened just then but also all that had taken place between us in the dargah, on the banks of the Ganga, in the Blue Room, in the Intercontinental Hotel, and, in any other place under the sun.

  It was late when we left Gargi’s place. The photographer’s shop was closed. Of the stabbing no traces remained — not even in the person of an odd policeman. I didn’t think human life counted for very much on that street. It had been a strange evening. I should have been back in Bombay, asleep beside Geeta on the wide bed. Instead... instead what?

  Instead, Aftab led us towards the end of the street. A holy bull, a bell around his neck, blocked the way. He looked up at me smugly as I detoured around his head. Beyond the bull there was a hint of the river. On a deserted ghat some kind of a carnival was on. There were flags and petromax lights and the sound of drums. There was the cackle of vendors. A beggar tried to grab my feet. I kicked at him — to the horror of the bystanders.

  There was a juggler, tall, broad-shouldered, bare-chested, virile. He wore the narrow brocaded black waistcoat of the gypsies and a black lungi. His eyes were coal-black, a little drugged. He laid them out now, a dozen balls, sticks, copper wire, china plates, a jagged piece of glass. He performed faultlessly with the balls, his eyes not straying from Anuradha’s face for a minute. The longing in them was so obvious that I wondered how she could ignore it. Aftab threw him coins. And now the rest of his family, the rope dancers, the drummers, swept into the act. The drumming was stepped up. The mother took up a song that brought forth the sands of Arabia. It was as though a desert had suddenly sprung on the banks of the Ganga.

  A tight-rope was now slung between two sets of poles. A boy and a girl, probably brother and sister, moved from either end of the rope to meet at the centre, under the light of a petromax. Locked in an incestuous embrace, they danced about in jerky motions. As a finale, the boy stood on the father’s shoulders, the girl sat on the boy’s. This grotesque of rags and sores now moved towards us with a cripple’s gait, the light for a moment darkened by its menacing shadow. I handed them money before they could pester Anuradha but they went to her anyway. The juggler grinned at her and she smiled back. She opened her purse and took out a couple of notes. She raised her hand in the air towards the girl who, in slow movements, bent down from her brother’s shoulders, the little human pyramid shaking all the time, and took the money from her hand.

  There was a flower stall where Aftab bought a gajra for Anuradha. We waited while he put it in her hair. There was a stall of funny mirrors, another, for Siamese twins. A second juggler put a long needle through his cheeks. A clown with a picture machine sang: ‘Kutub Sahib ki laat ko dekho, aur Duke Connaught ko dekho.’ An old man sitting on a stool, all by himself, in a voice of unbelievable sadness, sang a Bhojpuri ballad. Entranced, for some reason unable to control my emotions, I stood before him aware neither of Anuradha nor of the carnival nor of my bearings. I was only aware that I stood far from home, in a most desolate of places, from where there could be no rescue. When Aftab offered the old man money he refused. A yogi stood in the centre of a little crowd, the point of a spear against an eye. As we watched the spear started to bend, slowly at first, then in a rush until the looplit fell on the ground. The crowd applauded.

  In a tent a dancer, looking a bit like Azizun, waited, hand on hips. Anuradha paused before an astrologer’s stall, hesitated, then went in. We followed.

  The stall was dimly lit with the help of a lantern. Aftab stumbled over a hole in the mud floor. At the far end, on a raised platform, a little bird-like boy sat behind a wooden desk. The boy, however, was not a boy but an
old man with most of his hair already white. He looked up at us with enthusiasm; we might have been his first customers of the evening.

  Holding her hand, the little old man inquired from Anuradha her date of birth. Without letting go of her, as though he feared she might fly away, he consulted a voluminous book. When he turned once again to her I was struck by little beads of perspiration on his brow. I thought he looked disturbed. Aftab shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He, too, perhaps had sensed the astrologer’s discomfort.

  Next door, the dance heated up, the tablas thumping away, the sarangi keeping a dutiful wail to another melancholy song of a woman’s wait for her lover. (Could it be Krishna again?) The old man’s prophecies, if such they were, were drowned out by the music and the clap of the dancer’s feet. Anuradha’s consultations were abruptly over. She pulled away her hand, opened her bag and handed the old man his fees. He looked at us, expectant but unsure. He could not have been in the business too long, to judge by his diffidence. I did not believe in astrology but, on an impulse, I took Anuradha’s place on the platform.

  ‘Please think of a flower,’ the old man stammered out.

  I thought of the marigolds in Azizun’s balcony.

  ‘Marigolds?’ said the astrologer tentatively.

  ‘Absolutely!’ I laughed.

  This triumph raised his spirits a bit. We waited, like boxers in a ring, wondering who was to call the next shot.

  ‘There is something that I want,’ I began.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will I get it?’

  He stared at my palm for a minute.

  ‘Can you tell me what it is that you want?’ His diffidence had returned.

  The idea of the shares crossed my mind.

  ‘I cannot tell you that,’ I said.

  After another minute of palm-staring, he said, ‘It is a girl friend that you want.’

  ‘A girl friend?’