Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

Photographs were taken, arati was performed several times with lamps and sweets on a silver platter, and each of the good figures, including many of the monkeys and bears, were fed. They looked properly serious now. Some of the rowdier elements of the crowd had already dispersed. But most of the audience remained, and accepted the leftover sweets as a sanctified offering. Even the demons got their share.

The tazia procession from Baitar House to the city Imambara was a stately business. The Baitar House tazia was famous: it had been made many years before, and was a magnificent affair of silver and crystal. Each year on the ninth day of Moharram it was carried to the city Imambara, where it was displayed overnight and the next morning. Then, on the afternoon of the tenth day, together with all the other replicas of the tomb of the Imam Hussain, it was carried in a grand procession to the ‘Karbala’, the field outside Brahmpur specially designated for the burial of the tazias. But unlike those made of mere paper and glass, the silver Baitar House tazia (like a few others that were equally precious) was not smashed and buried in an open pit dug for the purpose. It was left on the field for an hour or so, its temporary ornaments of tinsel and kite paper and mica were buried, and the tazia itself was taken back to the house by the servants.

The Baitar House procession this year consisted of Firoz (dressed in a white sherwani), a couple of drummers, six young men (three on each side) carrying the great tazia along on strong wooden poles, some of the house servants who beat their chests rhythmically and cried out the names of the martyrs (but did not use whips or chains), and a couple of constables to represent the forces of law and order. Their route from Pasand Bagh was rather long, so they started out early.

By early evening they had got to the street outside the Imambara which was the meeting place for the various tazia processions of the different guilds and neighbourhoods and great houses. Here stood a tall pole, at least sixty feet high, with a green and black flag fluttering above. Here also stood the statue of a horse, Hussain’s brave steed, richly decorated during Moharram with flowers and precious cloth. And here also, just outside the Imambara, near the wayside shrine of a local saint, was a busy fair — where the mourning of the processionists intermingled with the festive excitement of people buying or selling knick-knacks and holy pictures, and children eating all sorts of delicious street food, including sweets, ice-cream and candyfloss — coloured not only pink but also green for Moharram.

Most tazia processions were much less decorous than the one that represented the Nawab Sahib’s family: their grief was loud, their drumbeats deafening, their self-flagellations bloody. Nor did they prize decorum above sincerity. The fervour of their feelings was what carried them onwards. Unshod, naked above the waist, their backs a mess of blood from the chains with which they lashed themselves, the men accompanying the tazias panted and moaned as they took the name of Imam Hussain and his brother Hassan repeatedly, rhythmically, in plaintive or agonized lament. Some of the processions that were known to be the most fervent were accompanied by as many as a dozen policemen.

The routes of the tazia processions had been charted out with great care by the organizers and the police together. Hindu areas were to be avoided as far as possible, and in particular the area of the contested temple; low-lying branches of pipal trees were measured in advance against the heights of tazias, so that neither would be damaged; the processionists were enjoined from cursing the caliphs; and timings were matched so that by nightfall all the processions throughout the city would have arrived at the central destination.

Maan met Firoz, as agreed, a little before sunset near the statue of the horse by the Imambara.

‘Ah, so you’ve come, you kafir.’ Firoz was looking very handsome in his white sherwani.

‘But only to do what all kafirs do,’ replied Maan.

‘And what is that?’

‘Why don’t you have your Nawabi walking stick with you?’ asked Maan, who had been looking Firoz up and down.

‘It wouldn’t have been appropriate for the procession,’ replied Firoz. ‘I’d have been expected to beat myself with it, no doubt. But you haven’t answered my question.’

‘Oh — what was that?’

‘What is it that all kafirs do?’

‘Is that a riddle?’ asked Maan.

‘It is not,’ said Firoz. ‘You just said that you’d come to do what all kafirs do. And I’m asking you what that is.’

‘Oh, to prostrate myself before my idol. You said she’d be here.’

‘Well, there she is,’ said Firoz, jerking his head lightly in the direction of the nearby crossroads. ‘I’m pretty sure.’

A woman dressed in a black burqa was standing at a booth, distributing sherbet to those who passed by in the tazia processions or who milled about the temporary market. They drank, they handed the glasses back, and these were dumped into a bucket of water by another woman in a brown burqa and given a cursory wash before being reused. The stand was very popular, probably because it was known who the lady in black was.

‘Quenching the thirst of Karbala,’ added Firoz.

‘Come,’ said Maan.

‘No, no, you go along. That other one’s Bibbo, by the way, the one in the brown burqa. Not Tasneem.’

‘Come with me, Firoz. Please. I really have no business to be here. I’ll feel very awkward.’

‘Nothing like as awkward as I felt when I went to her gathering last night. No, I’m going to see the tazias lined up. Most of them have arrived already, and each year there’s something astonishing to see. Last year there was one in the shape of a double-storeyed peacock with a woman’s head — and only half a dome to tell you it was meant to be a tomb. We’re becoming Hinduized.’

‘Well, if I come with you to see the tazias, will you accompany me to the sherbet-stand?’

‘Oh — all right.’

Maan quickly got bored with the tazias, remarkable though they were. Everyone around him appeared to be engaged in heated discussion about which one was the most elegant, the most elaborate, the most expensive. ‘I recognize that one,’ said Maan with a smile; he had seen it in the Imambara at Baitar House.

‘Well, we’ll probably use it for another fifty years,’ said Firoz. ‘I doubt we’ll be able to afford to make anything like that again.’

‘Come, now, keep your part of the bargain.’

‘All right.’

Firoz and Maan walked over to the sherbet-stand.

‘It’s too unhygienic for words, Maan — you can’t drink from those glasses.’

But Maan had gone forward, pushed his way through the crowd and now held his hand out for a glass of sherbet. The woman in black handed it to him, but at the last moment, as her eyes suddenly registered who he was, she was so startled that she spilled the sherbet over his hands.

She took her breath in sharply and said, ‘Excuse me, Sir,’ in a low voice. ‘Let me pour you another glass.’

There was no mistaking her voice. ‘No, no, Madam,’ protested Maan. ‘Please do not trouble yourself. What is left in this glass will more than quench my thirst, however terrible.’

The woman in the brown burqa turned towards him upon hearing his voice. Then the two women turned towards each other. Maan sensed their tension, and he allowed himself a smile.

Bibbo may not have been surprised to see Maan, but Saeeda Bai was both surprised and displeased. As Maan had expected, she thought he had no business to be there; certainly he could not pretend to any lavish fondness for the Shia martyrs. But his smile only succeeded in making her angrier. She contrasted the flippancy of Maan’s remark with the terrible thirst of the heroes of Karbala — their tents burning behind them, the river cut off in front of them — and, making no attempt this time to disguise her voice or her indignation, she said to Maan: ‘I am running short of supplies. There is a booth half a mile farther on where I would advise you to go when you have finished this glass. It is run by a lady of great piety; the sherbet is sweeter, and you will find the crowd less oppressive.’