The Weary Generations (3 page)

After a pause, Ayaz Beg said quietly, ‘Yes, yes, of course.'

Naim was beginning to feel uncomfortable; never before had he heard of his father being talked about like this. When Ayaz Beg changed the subject and the two men began to talk about the political situation in the country, Naim felt relief. He started looking around. The nawab's glasses seemed embedded deep into the flesh of his nose. In contrast, his hands were delicate, with perfectly tapered fingers, which he moved prettily as he talked. He was a man of ordinary features, yet appeared imposingly attractive because of the manner in which he conducted himself. The room was opulently furnished. Directly behind Naim's chair stood a mounted tiger, looking alarmingly alive. The floors were covered with the deepest-pile Kashmiri rugs Naim had ever seen. Tall camel-skin floor lamps stood in four corners of the room. As the two older men conversed, a servant had silently entered to switch on the lamps, their soft light falling on the intricate wine-and-fawn patterns of the carpets. The nawab's eye-glasses glinted. After a little while, the nawab got up and went to the window that opened on to the veranda and the lawn beyond. After having had a look, he turned to tell his guests that the seating outside was nearly in place. Then he excused himself for having to go inside and change for dinner.

Out on the lawn, all the napkins, now properly done, were placed beside the crockery and cutlery, and bearers in starched white uniforms were moving among the tables making the last arrangements. There was no one else. Ayaz Beg sat down in a chair and started fiddling with his camera, which he had brought along especially to take pictures of the evening's ceremony. Naim was wandering along the edges of the lawn, looking at rows of flowers, when a group of girls and boys came out of the house and scattered over the lawn in twos and threes. The tall boy, after offering a respectful salaam to Ayaz Beg, approached Naim.

‘My name is Pervez,' he said, extending his hand. ‘You have come from Calcutta, right?'

‘Yes,' Naim said in reply. He shook hands with the boy and stood quietly looking at him. During a lonely, unthreatened upbringing it had become his natural manner not to feel the compulsion to say something and yet appear anything but impolite.

‘Let's go and meet others,' Pervez said.

As they approached the first two people, the rest of the youngsters started joining them. They had all changed into formal dress.

‘This – this is Naim,' Pervez introduced him. ‘He – he has come from Calcutta. This,' he pointed to the hazel-eyed girl, ‘is my sister Azra,' then pointing to the rest, ‘and they, I mean, are all members of family or friends.'

Naim kept silently touching the tassel of his red Turkish cap.

‘Happy to meet you,' one of them said. ‘Let's sit down.'

They sat down in chairs.

‘Do you not speak at all?' asked Azra, her eyes dancing.

‘No – no. I mean, yes,' Naim said.

‘Nice name,' a thin boy spoke in English. ‘I like it.'

Although their playfulness was gone, Naim discerned a vaguely mocking manner in them, which they used with each other as well. Only Azra kept talking in that frank and fearless way that could be taken as a shade too assertive. She was wearing a white silk sari.

‘Do you know how to fold a napkin?' she asked.

‘No,' Naim said.

‘Actually,' she said, ‘none of us does. We only discovered this today.'

‘Aw, that isn't fair, Azra,' the thin boy said. ‘You might as well say we don't know how to wrap a sari around us.'

Some of them laughed quietly. Naim felt that they weren't laughing at what was actually being said, just amusing themselves because they were in a certain mood, as if carrying on a private engagement. There was wilfulness in their exchange.

Ayaz Beg called out to Naim. He wanted help with fixing the camera, of which Naim perhaps knew more than his uncle did. It was a big box camera with a light-bulb flash, and Naim could take it apart and put it together again. It took them several minutes before it was loaded and the shutter working properly. Guests had started arriving. Nawab Ghulam Mohyyeddin stood at the entrance with a handsome middle-aged woman, receiving the guests. Azra stood alongside them. First came the foreigners, most of them British. Some of them wore top hats and long coats, under which they were sweating. They handed their hats and coats to the servants and were led to the best sofa chairs in the seating area, where they sat smoking cigars and talking in low voices, their women in high-neck dresses smoking long cigarettes stuck in equally long holders held aloft. The women laughed loudly, feeling free. The Indian guests arrived a little later. They were in various attires, marked by their area of origin, but chiefly by religion: Muslims in tasselled Turkish caps and long gowns, Hindus in hitched-in-the-middle loose dhotis and turbans, only a few of them in non-denominational sherwanis. They paid scant attention to the servants and went and sat silently on one side, bunched together, not
caring to remove their large, loosely wound turbans and holding their canes straight up on the ground in front of them between their legs. They had all come in two- and four-horse behlis, only some foreigners and very few Indians arriving in automobiles. An Indian, in a shiny, gold-worked sherwani and tight turban, with a young man in Western dress trailing him, arrived in a car. The nawab met him, executing a deep bow. Someone said it was the Maharajkumar of Partap Nagar and the young man his secretary. He handed his gold-topped cane to the young man, who hung on to it. The Maharajkumar went and sat with the Britishers. An Englishwoman, sitting three seats away, leaned forward and waved to him. The man waved back.

As Mr Gokhle arrived, all the Indians and two British people stood up to greet him. Ayaz Beg mentioned his name. Naim went and stood close to him. He had heard the name before, but it was the first time he had set eyes on the man. He had on a sherwani-type half-coat, buttoned up to the neck, over pantaloons, both in black, and wore a cap, the kind Naim had seen on Tilak's head in photographs in Calcutta. A long narrow muffler was thrown freely round his neck. Wearing gold-rimmed glasses, the man might have been considered good-looking were he not so weak, thin and pale. Among the younger people, Naim was the only one who stepped forward and shook hands with him. Mrs Besant was the last to arrive. She wore a bright yellow sari and went and sat with the Indian guests. Upon her arrival, a hesitant conversation began in that group. Some British men stared at her. Servants were offering fruit juices to the guests. Naim stood under a young pomegranate tree, looking up in the subdued glow of a Japanese lantern hung among the branches to the shimmering red buds that had begun to appear. It's a winter fruit, Naim thought absent-mindedly. What's it doing here in May?

‘Hello,' Azra said, emerging from behind the tree. ‘Have you had something to drink?'

‘No,' Naim replied.

‘Have this.' Azra proffered a tumbler full of fruit juice. Naim immediately lifted it to his lips.

‘Do you never take off your hat?'

‘No. Oh yes, I do,' blurted out Naim, taking a quick gulp of the drink.

Azra shone her eyes, which seemed in the half-darkness to have become almost black. ‘Take it off then.'

Naim took his tarboosh off and began to stroke its tassel with his thumb.

‘Here, you look much better without it, don't you think?'

For the first time, Naim had the presence of mind to answer, ‘I don't
know, I can't see myself.'

Azra smiled. ‘Undo these,' she said, pointing to the top buttons of his sherwani.

‘What?'

‘Come on. Open up.'

As Naim undid the top three buttons, Azra suddenly blushed. ‘Don't you feel hot bundled up like this?'

‘No,' Naim said.

‘Look, our sweet peas, they are already wilting. Well, I have to go in the house. Go and talk to some people, won't you? See you later.'

She was still red-faced as she walked away from him. Beautifully wrapped in the sari, she seemed an altogether grown-up, simple young woman after all, and for the first time since stepping into this house Naim felt comfortable. He reached out and plucked a flower that had dried up on its stem. He looked at it for a moment and let it drop to the ground.

The talk among the guests had now started in earnest. The Englishman with a huge head was talking animatedly, a finger raised above his head as if in admonition, to the man sitting next to him, while two others, leaning forward, listened intently. Next, in a four-seater, damask-covered couch, sat the Maharajkumar, flanked on one side by the Chief Commissioner, on the other by Nawab Ghulam Mohyyeddin and another British gentleman. In his hands the Maharajkumar had a deck of playing cards which he was trying to organize in a certain order.

‘This is not the time or place for a game of cards,' he was saying, ‘my apologies, nawab sahib. But I want to show you a fantastic trick I learned from a lady on my last trip to Paris.'

The Maharajkumar couldn't set up the cards as he wished and handed the deck to his secretary, who had stood behind him all along, to do the job.

‘It is not strictly a trick,' he said to the Chief Commissioner, ‘not a one-off, but a “game” of tricks. I'll tell you the basic rules …' An Englishman, sitting on the other side of the Chief Commissioner, was showing great interest in the intricacies of what the Maharajkumar was explaining, while his secretary shuffled and rearranged the cards like a professional. Waiting for the cards, the Maharajkumar began nervously to reminisce. ‘You know, in the hotel in Paris where I was staying, I saw a strange sight. As I came out of my room one morning, a man, stark naked but for a towel thrown across his shoulders, passed me in the corridor. I said, “I am sorry.” The man paid no attention to me. He went down the passage and into his room. Next morning, as I stepped out at the same hour, I was confronted
by the very same man, once again in the altogether, coming down the veranda from God knows where. Loud enough for him to hear, I said, “I am sorry,” and withdrew from his path. He appeared not to have seen me at all, much less respond to my apology.'

The Englishwoman blushed. ‘Few of them understand English,' she said apologetically.

‘Surprising,' the Maharajkumar said, ‘considering that the French coast is only a few miles from England.'

‘Correct,' replied the woman. ‘Isn't it amazing?'

‘But that is not all,' the Maharajkumar continued. ‘As the man passed me the second day, I turned back to look. And what do I see but a lady coming up from the opposite direction. This lady, would you believe, appeared to notice neither the naked man nor me, and passed us both as if nothing existed in front of her but the ground beneath her feet. Well, after that,' he paused, ‘I got used to Paris.'

The Chief Commissioner smiled. The Englishman sitting next to the nawab, leaning forward, spoke in a tone of exaggerated importance. ‘Frenchwomen are not like Indian ladies, after all.'

‘No, no,' the Maharajkumar said, appearing thoughtful. ‘They are hardworking women.'

This induced laughter all round. The secretary handed over the deck of cards, properly arranged. The Maharajkumar started showing the trick to his audience.

Naim moved on. The huge-headed Englishman, now on his feet, paced up and down in front of his listeners, and, most unlike his race of people, still talked on with much animation. On the first of the Indians' seats, two men in very large and loose turbans and dhotis, who looked like a higher class of trader, sat discussing the prices of commodities and other matters of the market. Outside the main gate the waiting motor cars and polished behlis with their colourfully decorated horses, just visible from the lawn, had attracted the street people and children, who stood around to view them in fascination. The police that had accompanied the British officers, and the Chief Commissioner's own guards, were busy shooing them away with threatening curses and lathis raised overhead. But the viewers of this finery, with their customary stubbornness, would shift from one spot to another, refusing to go away. The sky was now completely dark, with only the glimmer of stars scattered far into the warm cloudless night. On a sofa, in the Indians' area, Ayaz Beg was deep in conversation with Annie Besant, as was a man with very pale skin and dark hair.

‘But, Mr Beg, at this point I disagree with Madame Blavatsky,'
Mrs Besant was saying. ‘She contends that beings in the stars are not material but only spirits, and wants to prove their existence by invoking super-naturalism. But the point is that they are indeed material bodies, and can be proved by physical phenomena. The introduction of physical sciences does no harm to theosophy.'

‘I did answer this point in my letter to you last January,' Ayaz Beg said to her. ‘The time has not yet come that physical sciences may be imposed upon …'

‘There is no question of “imposing”, Mr Beg. The point is …'

Naim stopped listening. He had heard all this from his uncle often enough and had long ago lost interest in it. He kept looking at Annie Besant, though, whose white hair made a kind of close-knit hat on her head and who had one of the most alluring voices Naim had ever heard. The girl who had left him standing under the tree a short while back wasn't to be seen anywhere. Suddenly, a sense of melancholy, to which he was given on occasion, seized Naim. He wandered on.

Nawab Ghulam Mohyyeddin had shifted to another sofa where he was now sitting beside the handsome woman who had earlier been acting as the hostess at the reception point. There were two Englishmen and an Indian by their side; the five of them formed a group of sorts and were listening to the Indian gentleman who had just been handed, by one of the nawab's servants, a long-barrelled heavy pistol with a wooden handle. The Indian, a man with a nice, intelligent face who was the last one to arrive by motor car and had entered the house leaning heavily on a walking stick, dragging an obviously gammy leg behind him, had been received warmly by several people, including the Chief Commissioner, and was now sitting with his leg, presumably wooden, straight out in front of him, admiring the handgun, handling it in a way that showed his familiarity with guns. Naim overheard Annie Besant behind him saying to her companion, ‘I would like to speak to Mr Gokhle. He looks so weak …' Shortly afterwards she got up and walked across, Ayaz Beg and another man following her, to where Gokhle was sitting. People sitting over there made room for the three to sit beside Gokhle. Naim followed them at a short distance. As he passed the lame Indian he heard him say, ‘The Germans, they make such wonderful machines. There isn't a single screw or even a rivet in the whole piece. A work of art. When I went for the tiger-hunt last year …'