•
As the exams drew near, the boys came back, but the liveliness and activity didn’t. Then the vacation came. Back in Vyaspur again. How the weather changed! It gradually changed so much that hot western winds began to blow. By noon the doors of the houses were closed, the woven grass screens shielding the verandahs were drenched again and again with water. But the small lanes never saw the sun. In those lanes were so many houses that had no need for woven grass screens. In the doorways women could be seen, spinning and talking.
“Did you see?” Surendar asked, emerging in a great hurry from Pattharvali Lane.
“No, yar, I didn’t see anybody.”
“She was standing on the balcony, didn’t you see?”
“No, who was standing?”
“Rimjhim, who else?”
“Rimjhim?”
“Yes, I call her Rimjhim. Wait till you see her, you bastard, you’ll die!”
They took one turn along the lane, then another turn, then a third turn, but she wasn’t to be seen. “She’s disappeared.”
Surendar had not given up hope. Seeing a monkey-man, he suddenly grinned. “Listen, yar, we’ll go along with him.”
The monkey-man, in the full heat of the afternoon, went playing his hourglass-shaped drum from one lane to a second, from the second lane to a third. Finally in Pattharvali Lane he began his show. When the female monkey didn’t behave, the male monkey beat her with a stick, until she grew angry and went home to her mother’s house.
Surendar’s gaze was fixed on the balcony. He believed she’d surely come to see the monkeys perform.
“Come on, you bastard, look!”
“Where?”
“On the balcony, she’s standing there.”
He looked. A darkish complexion, a very slender, very soft body.
“Well if it isn’t a little Muslim brat!” She instantly drew back into the room, and vanished.
She didn’t appear again. So what. Surendar had taught him how to look at a girl.
•
Then he went off to Rupnagar. He had to go to Rupnagar too during that vacation, to see Khalah Jan. After so many years he saw Rupnagar again. The potholed road still layered with dust, with heaps of stone-chips still lying here and there on either side, horse-carts still bouncing up and down, ox-carts still crawling along the unpaved tracks. All this was just the same. With a contented wonder he looked at it all. But not everything was just the same. All his playmates had grown so tall. Their complexions had darkened and ripened, their voices had deepened. Habib had passed the Matriculation exam and gone off to Aligarh, and now had come back for the vacation, looking quite fashionable. His trousers were of a new cut. While once his head used to be shaved, then rubbed with a mango-stone,* now he had long English-style hair. Auntie Sharifan had sent Bundu too to Aligarh, to learn locksmithing.
And Sabirah! How tall Sabirah had grown, and how her bosom had swelled out, so that she always kept it covered with her dupattah. Nevertheless, two round swellings made themselves apparent. Now she didn’t even meet his eyes, as though he was a stranger.
He wandered through lane after lane, bazaar after bazaar. He was like a thirsty man whose thirst was being assuaged, after so long, by these familiar sights. How impatiently he looked at things, impatiently and desirously — as though he wanted to suck everything in through his eyes. Things were sometimes the same as before, sometimes changed. How numerous the electric poles had become. Except for the Small Bazaar, their wires now spread everywhere. The monkeys, avoiding the wires, were leaping from roof to roof. Rupnagar’s monkeys had learned to live in the age of electricity.
From the Black Temple to Karbala, from Karbala to the Fort, from the Fort to the Ravan Wood, all was as before. For a long time he wandered there, he bathed himself in the scene, but he was not entirely satisfied. The mysteriousness that used to permeate everything seemed to have departed. Calling to mind his former fears, he looked from afar at the Black Temple, at its big pipal tree, and at the stout monkey sitting on the topmost branch, but no amazement arose in his eyes, no amazement and no fear. Everything was as before, but perhaps he had changed, or perhaps his former relationship with it all had changed — his relationship with the Black Temple, with the big pipal tree, with the pipal’s monkeys, with the silent enclosure of Karbala, with the Ravan Wood, with the banyan tree standing in the midst of it, perhaps with Sabirah too.
Unsatisfied, restless, tired, he went back to the house. The heat was intense. He took up a towel; crossing the courtyard that simmered in the afternoon sun, he went toward the bathing-room. The bathing-room was still the same as before, and couldn’t be fastened from either inside or outside. People knew by intuition whether anyone was in it or not. But now perhaps he had lost his intuition, for he opened the panels of the bathing-room door — and then, before they were fully open, closed them. Lightning had struck in his eyes.
For a long time he was lost in that lightning-like moment. He was astonished to think that his cousin Tahirah was a full-grown woman. That day he couldn’t even meet her eyes. The next day, avoiding her eyes, he inspected her from head to foot. That white, rounded body rose up in his imagination. With all its details. His cheeks reddened with shame. How many reproaches he heaped on himself in his heart! But Tahirah hadn’t the slightest idea of it. She talked freely with him, and asked him every detail about the College.
“Zakir, does your College library have Rashid ul-Khairi’s Evening of Life?”
“Yes, it does.”
“Oh my God! Zakir, when you next come you absolutely must bring Evening of Life!”
Seeing that the talk had turned to novels, Sabirah too hesitantly approached, and squeezed in next to Tahirah. How passionately she was listening to the talk of novels! From the kitchen Khalah Jan’s voice came, “Oh Tahirah, check on the food, don’t let it burn. I’m kneading the flour.”
When Tahirah went, Sabirah was left silent and ill at ease, but she wasn’t even able to get up and go away. He too sat awkwardly, embarrassed.
Gradually he gathered his courage: “Sabirah, have you read Paradise on Earth?”
“No, is it a good novel?”
He at once began to tell her the plot of Paradise on Earth. He told her the whole story.
“Zakir, will you bring Paradise on Earth for me?”
“Yes, I’ll bring it when I come.”
“When will you come next?”
“During the Christmas vacation.”
He gradually told her the plots of several of Sharar’s other novels as well. Including those details that he was hesitant in mentioning, and she was shy about listening to, for Sabirah had now come close to him. She was somewhat bored now with the usual household tasks. While Khalah Jan and Tahirah did the housework, she sat listening to him and talking with him. Sometimes loud conversations, sometimes very soft ones. Sometimes so soft that the words became whispers, and Sabirah’s face reddened. And when, on the pretext of admiring her earrings, he touched the lobe of her ear, suddenly his breath grew warm and began to come faster. How soft and warm that earlobe was, so that a soft warm wave started in his fingertips and surged throughout his body.
•
The vacation was over so quickly. Rupnagar had caught hold of him, but after all he had to go back to the College, and before that he had to go and at least show his face to Ammi Jan at Vyaspur.