Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

They stared at Firoz as he stumbled into the room in his bloodstained white sherwani — and at Maan, clutching the bloodstained lathi in his hand. Kedarnath stepped forward, the other three shrank back. Old Mrs Tandon clapped her hands to her mouth. ‘Hai Ram! Hai Ram!’ she gasped in horror.

‘Firoz is staying here until we can get him out safely,’ said Maan, looking at each of them in turn. ‘There’s a mob roaming around — and there’ll be others. But everyone here is safe. No one will think of attacking this house.’

‘But the blood — are you wounded?’ asked Veena, turning to Firoz, her eyes distracted with concern.

Maan looked at Firoz’s sherwani and his own lathi, and suddenly burst out laughing. ‘Yes, this lathi did it, but I didn’t — and it’s not his blood.’

Firoz greeted his hosts as courteously as his own shock and theirs would allow.

Bhaskar, still tear-faced, seeing the effect of all this on his parents, looked strangely at Maan, who placed the long bamboo staff against the wall, and kissed his nephew on the forehead.

‘This is the Nawab Sahib of Baitar’s younger son,’ said Maan to old Mrs Tandon. She nodded silently. Her mind had turned to the days of Partition in Lahore and her memories and thoughts were those of absolute terror.

Firoz changed hurriedly out of his long coat into one of Kedarnath’s kurta-pyjamas. Veena made them a quick cup of tea with plenty of sugar. After a while, Maan and Firoz climbed up to the roof, to the pots and plants of the small garden. Maan crushed a small tulsi leaf and put it in his mouth.

As they looked around them they saw that fires had already broken out here and there in the city. They could make out several of the main buildings of Brahmpur: the spire of the Imambara still ablaze with light — the lights of the Barsaat Mahal, the dome of the Legislative Assembly, the railway station, and — far beyond the Subzipore Club, the fainter glow of the university. But here and there in the old city it was not lights but fire that lit the sky. The muted din of drums came to them from the direction of the Imambara. And distant shouts, more distinct at times as the breeze changed, reached their ears, together with other sounds that could have been firecrackers, but were more likely the sounds of police firing.

‘You saved my life,’ said Firoz.

Maan embraced him. He smelt of sweat and fear.

‘You should have had a wash before you changed,’ he said. ‘All that running in your sherwani — thank God you’re safe.’

‘Maan, I must get back. They’ll be worried crazy about me at the house. They’ll risk their own lives to look for me. . ’

Suddenly the lights went out at the Imambara.

Firoz said in quiet dread: ‘What could have happened there?’

Maan said: ‘Nothing.’ He was wondering how Saeeda Bai would have got back to Pasand Bagh. Surely she must have remained in the safe area near the Imambara.

The night was warm, but there was a slight breeze. Neither of them said anything for a while.

A large glow now lit the sky about half a mile to the west. This was the lumberyard of a well-known Hindu trader who lived in a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood. Other fires sprang up around it. The drums were silent now, and the sounds of intermittent firing were very clear. Maan was too exhausted to feel any fear. A numbness and a terrible feeling of isolation and helplessness came over him.

Firoz closed his eyes, as if to shut out the terrible vision of the city in flames. But other fires beset his mind — the fire-acrobats of the Moharram fair; the embers of the trench dug outside the Imambara at Baitar House burning with logs and brushwood for ten days; the candelabra of the Imambara at the Fort blazing and guttering as Ustad Majeed Khan sang Raag Darbari while his father nodded with pleasure.

He suddenly got up, agitated.

Someone shouted from a neighbouring rooftop that curfew had been declared.

‘How could it be declared?’ asked Maan. ‘People couldn’t have got home by now.’ He added softly, ‘Firoz, sit down.’

‘I don’t know,’ shouted the man. ‘But it has just been announced on the radio that curfew has been declared and that in an hour police will have orders to shoot on sight. Before then, only if they see actual violence.’

‘Yes, that makes sense,’ Maan shouted back, wondering what, if anything, made sense any more.

‘Who are you? Who’s that with you? Kedarnath? Is everyone safe in your family?’

‘It’s not Kedarnath — it’s a friend who came to see the Bharat Milaap. I’m Veena’s brother.’

‘Well, you’d better not move tonight, if you don’t want to get your throat slit by the Muslims — or get shot by the police. What a night. Tonight of all nights.’

‘Maan,’ said Firoz quietly and urgently, ‘can I use your sister’s phone?’

‘She doesn’t have one,’ said Maan.

Firoz looked at him with dismay.

‘A neighbour’s then. I have to get word back to Baitar House. If the news of the curfew is on the radio, my father will hear of it at the Fort in Baitar, and he will be terrified about what’s happened here. Imtiaz might try to come back and get a curfew pass. For all I know Murtaza Ali might already be sending out search parties for me, and at a time like this that’s crazy. Do you think you might phone from the house of one of Veena’s friends?’

‘We don’t want anyone to know you’re here,’ said Maan. ‘But don’t worry, I’ll find a way,’ he said when he saw the look of sickening anxiety on his friend’s face. ‘I’ll talk to Veena.’

Veena too had memories of Lahore; but her most recent memories were those of losing Bhaskar at the Pul Mela, and she could conceive the Nawab Sahib’s agony of mind when he heard that Firoz had not returned home.

‘How about trying Priya Agarwal?’ said Maan. ‘I could go over to her place.’

‘Maan, you’re not going anywhere,’ said his sister. ‘Are you mad? It’s a five-minute walk through the alleys — this isn’t why I tied the rakhi around your wrist.’ After a minute’s thought she said: ‘I’ll go to the neighbour whose phone I use in an emergency. It’s only two rooftops away. You met her that day — she’s a good woman, the only trouble is that she is rabidly anti-Muslim. Let me think. What’s the number of Baitar House?’

Maan told her.

Veena came up to the roof with him, crossed over the connected rooftops, and descended the stairs to her neighbour’s house.

Veena’s large and voluble neighbour, out of her usual friendliness and curiosity, hung around while Veena made the call. The phone, after all, was in her room. Veena told her she was trying to get in touch with her father.

‘But I just saw him at the Bharat Milaap, near the temple—’

‘He had to go home. The noise was too much for him. And the smoke was not good for my mother either. Or for Pran’s lungs — he didn’t come. But Maan is here — he’s had a lucky escape from a Muslim mob.’

‘It must be providence,’ said the woman. ‘If they had got hold of him—’

The telephone was not a dialling machine; and Veena had to give the Baitar House number to the operator.

‘Oh, you’re not calling Prem Nivas?’ said the woman, who knew that number from Veena’s previous calls.

‘No. Baoji had to visit friends later this evening.’

When a voice came on the line Veena said: ‘I would like to speak to the Sahib.’

An aged voice at the other end said, ‘Which Sahib? The Nawab Sahib or the Burré Sahib or the Chhoté Sahib?’

‘Anyone,’ said Veena.

‘But the Nawab Sahib is in Baitar with the Burré Sahib, and Chhoté Sahib has not yet come home from the Imambara.’ The aged voice — it was Ghulam Rusool — was halting and agitated. ‘They say there has been trouble in town, that you can see fires even from the roof of this house. I must go now. There are arrangements—’