Cracking India

And I chant: “Ayah! Ayah! Ayah! Ayah!” until my heart pounds with the chant and the children on the roof picking it up shout with all their heart: “Ayah! Ayah! Ayah! Ayah!” and our chant flows into the pulse of the women below, and the women on the roof, and they beat their breasts and cry: “Hai! Hai! Hai! Hai!” reflecting the history of their cumulative sorrows and the sorrows of their Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Rajput great-grandmothers who burnt themselves alive rather than surrender their honor to the invading hordes besieging their ancestral fortresses.

“I am past that,” says Mumtaz. “I’m not alive.”

“Oh, I know! You always have your way... ”
“Then why are you wasting my time?”

previous excursions inside the old city had been enlivened by the cries of shopkeepers and hawkers and the bawling and shrieking of urchins; the lanes teeming with men and burka-veiled women and littered with the discarded newspaper bags used by vendors. I miss the mounds of rotting fruit and vegetables and the bones picked clean by the kites, their enormous wings stirring in the garbage: and the sudden yelp of kicked mongrels and raucous flights of crows and scraps of cardboard and rusted iron and the other debris even the poor have no use for.

For a startled instant Ice-candy-man’s eyes lose their poetic mist and focus as clearly as an eagle’s on Godmother. But quickly retrieving his composure he says: “I’m truly sorry. Had I known you wished to see me I would have presented myself earlier.” He recites Faiz:
“Tum aye ho na sbab-e-intezar guzri hai—
Talash main hai seher baar baar guzri hai!
You never came ... The waitful night never passed—-
Though many dawns have passed in the waiting.”

“There is no God for the likes of you shaitans!”

The innocence that my parents’ vigilance, the servants’ care and Godmother’s love sheltered in me, that neither Cousin’s carnal cravings, nor the stories of the violence of the mobs, could quite destroy, was laid waste that evening by the emotional storm that raged round me. The confrontation between Ice-candy-man and Godmother opened my eyes to the wisdom of righteous indignation over compassion. To the demands of gratification—and the unscrupulous nature of desire.
To the pitiless face of love.

“Kiya mujh ishq ne zalim ko aab ahista ahista
Ke aatish gul ko karti hai gulab ahista ahista.
Slowly, my love has compelled her, slowly—
The way the sun touches open the rosebud, slowly.”

No wonder he founts poetry as if he popped out of his mother’s womb spouting rhyming sentences.

Where have the radiance and the animation gone? Can the soul be extracted from its living body? Her vacant eyes are bigger than ever: wide-opened with what they’ve seen and felt: wider even than the frightening saucers and dinner plates that describe the watchful orbs of the three dogs who guard the wicked Tinder Box witches’ treasures in underground chambers. Colder than the ice that lurks behind the hazel in Ice-candy-man’s beguiling eyes.
At last Ayah casts her lids down: and bowing her head, extends her hennaed hands to me. I move awkwardly into the voluminous skirt of her brocade garara. And through the prickling brocade and silver lame of her kamize at last feel the soft and rounded contours of her diminished flesh. She buries her head in me and buries me in all her finery; and in the dark and musky attar of her perfume.