Ustad Ramzi quietly took his leave and stepped outside. His hands shook as he filled out the complaint form. During the humiliating interview he had controlled his anger more than once.
❖
When he visited Gohar Jan’s place that evening it was drizzling again. The Music Room’s roof was still leaking. At regular intervals a few drops fell into the vessel on the floor.
After the recital ended Gohar Jan looked searchingly at Ustad Ramzi.
He had not touched the cup of tea that had been offered to him. Hearing a crack of thunder Ustad Ramzi started and made to leave, but Gohar Jan stopped him.
“You look preoccupied. What is the matter?”
Ustad Ramzi mentioned the flooding in the graveyard and his visit to the municipality. He told her he had decided to go and plead again with the director.
“Your rose garden must have been damaged too,”
Gohar Jan said after a moment’s silence.
Ustad Ramzi remained quiet.
“You must not worry,” Gohar Jan said as Ustad Ramzi was leaving. “It is a matter of a cemetery’s sanctity. The municipality will act on your request, I am sure.”
Her words did not console Ustad Ramzi.
“Please remember to send Ustad Ramzi some of your red rose branches,” Gohar Jan said to Banday Ali, who had come to remove the teacup.
“Certainly.”
“Banday Ali says he has cultivated this variety himself,” Gohar Jan said, turning towards Ustad Ramzi with a smile. “He claims it does not grow wild as often, when manured with used Darjeeling tea leaves.”
“That I guarantee,” Banday Ali smiled. “And once the stocks have taken root, I shall keep you supplied with scions.”
❖
Two days after Ustad Ramzi’s visit to the municipality offices no action had been taken by the authorities. To complicate matters, it rained heavily again one night. In the two intervening days he had filled buckets in the graveyard’s pool and carried and emptied them into the main sewer, no longer caring if and when the rains would stop.
The water level had receded a few inches as a result of the trainees’ and Ustad Ramzi’s efforts, but his knees had been hurting so badly that by the middle of the next day he was bedridden and unable to put his weight on his feet any longer. The hakim had been called and he prescribed Ustad Ramzi medicine for the inflammation of the joints.
He woke up the next morning early as usual, but lay in bed, marshaling all his energy against the lingering exhaustion that was compounded by a sense of helplessness. The medicine offered little help. The skies were again overcast, and the sandpipers and rain crows circled overhead, clamoring for more rains.
Ustad Ramzi was still in bed around ten o’clock when he heard loud voices in the enclosure, and the noise of some heavy vehicle driving in. Limping out of his room, he saw the municipality truck parking along the cemetery walls. He forgot all about his pain and for a few minutes stood watching dumbfounded.
“It was the matter of a cemetery’s sanctity,” he muttered to himself.
The contingent of municipal workers quickly got down to work. Later in the afternoon, a supervisor also dropped in to see how the work was progressing. In two days the cemetery was completely drained. It had showered a little during this time, but the sky was beginning to clear up, as a strong westerly wind picked up.
In the coming days Ustad Ramzi remained bedridden, but he received clan members who came individually and in small groups to congratulate Ustad Ramzi on his resourcefulness. He sent them to see the cemetery and its newly whitewashed walls that the trainees had painted with a double coat of lime after the weather dried up. They also saw the bathed gravestones and the rose-stocks planted some days ago with the help of Banday Ali. The clan had collected a donation for laying a new pipeline that would eliminate the risk of future flooding.
Ustad Ramzi had not visited Gohar Jan for many days. He felt anxious and his nerves were strained, but his kneejoints had gotten worse. It was easier for him to move around with the help of a walking stick, but he experienced sudden spasms of pain. Walking more than a few steps was impossible for him.
Ustad Ramzi’s condition deteriorated again when he contracted malarial fever. He was bedridden for a month and his diet was radically altered. Banday Ali visited him a few times during his illness, but Ustad Ramzi did not hear any news of Gohar Jan.
He slowly recovered, although his movements were still restricted.
Strife
Ustad Ramzi saw that the wild roses had made an appearance on one bough in the bushes planted in the cemetery. He smiled as he softly caressed the straight-petalled wild roses. Despite his careful pruning and the continuous grafting, one of its branches had escaped his notice. Nature’s gentle strife had obviated his efforts.
In a spot from where a dead root had been removed, Ustad Ramzi planted another stock and sat down to make a few scions. The banyans and cypresses that lined the eastern boundary wall had extended their shade as the sun climbed up, and taken the edge off the hot gusts that had started circulating.
There were times when Ustad Ramzi thought about the life he had given up: not with any feelings of regret, but with a desire to learn how, if at all, it might have changed him as a man. When reflecting on the choices he had made, and the existence he had bartered away, he often felt a curiosity about how life might have been different if he had chosen differently. There were many areas of his life in which these fancies at best remained incomplete pictures and half-realized emotions, and he increasingly felt that someone had lived inside him whom he had not fully recognized.
Sustained by a light diet in which milk had been replaced with water separated from curdled milk, his bodily powers had ebbed close to decrepitude. Now that his aggressive humors had quieted down and he no longer needed an outside influence to control them, Ustad Ramzi missed the evenings at Gohar Jan’s kotha more than ever. He felt a desire to visit Gohar Jan’s kotha and wondered why it was so.
Having ever held himself above succumbing to emotions, he was disturbed by the discovery of this longing in his heart. It put his own self-control and resolve in doubt and made him angry with himself.
In the same way that his careful grafting had still missed one rose bough, one association had brought to naught all his probity and care in the calibration of human relationships.
Once he ventured to Gohar Jan’s kotha but, unable to climb the staircase for the pain, he returned.
He recalled the evening when he had visited Gohar Jan after Tamami’s death. He had wanted to share his grief with someone, but his pride had not allowed the notion to take shape in his mind. He remembered that Gohar Jan only had sad reproach in her voice as she recalled her sister. Perhaps she pitied him for his inability to realize his own tragedy.
Ustad Ramzi no longer knew if it was grief he wanted to share or some guilt that he wished to confess to lighten his heart’s burden before her.
Passage
Some time passed. The bark on the trees became drier. In the kotha the sills of the windows and the lintels of the doors became loose. The steps on the stairwell splintered and broke; Banday Ali had to repair them himself.
Gohar Jan had survived a long bout of typhoid fever. She was convalescing when she received the notice from the municipality requiring them to vacate the premises within ninety days. The entire stretch of buildings was declared uninhabitable. Other kothas received similar notices.