One day I was at the
kotwali
singing praise of our
Khwaja
Sahib. A clerk whose tongue was coated with odious criticisms said loud enough for all to hear, ‘
Ajee
, what can one say about a gentleman like you! The more one says the less adequate it is! At one place you are Musaddi Lai Kayastha, at another Shaikh Abdullah, some you greet with a
Ram Ram,
others with a
salaam:
with Muslims you bow towards the Kaaba; with the Hindus you kiss the penis of Shiva; a courtier in the
kotwali
, a
dervish
in the hospice; one foot in a monastery, the other on your woman’s
charpoy
. You get the best of both worlds. Yes sir, the more one praises you, the less adequate it seems.’
I did not return to the
kotwali
after my midday meal. I lay on my
charpoy
in the courtyard, gazing at the grey sky and thinking about what that clerk had said. If I’d had the power I would have had the fellow taken to the market-place, his trousers pulled down and ordered every citizen to spit on his bottom.
Ram Dulari sat down beside me and asked, ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Can’t be nothing. It’s written on your face. Why don’t you tell me?’
I told her. She listened quietly. When I had finished, she gaped at the wall; I gaped at the sky. ‘There are many like us,’ I told her, ‘There is that poet Abdul Hassan who also calls himself Sultani and Ameer Khusrau. His father was Muslim, his mother Hindu. For Hindus he writes in Hindi, for Muslims in Persian. For Indians he praises everything about India; for Muslims he praises everything in the lands of the Muslims. He flatters the sultan and he flatters the Khwaja Sahib. And he is the favourite of both. He writes poems praising the
omarah
and extracts many
tankas
from them; at the same time he pretends to be a
dervish
. No one dares to say anything to him because he is Muslim. It is only poor Hindus like us who wish to befriend Hindus as well as Muslims who get spat on by both; we are neither one nor the other. They treat us as if we were
hijdas.
’
‘Let our enemies be
hijdas
!’ exclaimed Ram Dulari angrily. ‘You talk to this man Abdul Hassan or Khusrau or whatever his name is. Ask him for advice.’
‘I don’t like him. He never says anything without a sting in it. He is too clever for the likes of me.’
‘If you speak nicely to him, he may become your friend.’
‘
Aree
! You are very innocent; you don’t know the ways of the world. The rich only make friends with the rich. The clever only like admirers and flatterers. Khusrau is both rich and clever. I am not important enough to matter to him. And I will not waste my time pandering to his vanity.’
However, the next day when I went to Ghiaspur I ran straight into this chap Abdul Hassan Ameer Khusrau. As usual he was surrounded by a ring of admirers. Also as usual the only voice you could hear was his. As soon as he saw me he aimed a barbed shaft at me: ‘Lala Musaddi Lal
alias
Abdullah brings his august presence amongst us.’ I exchanged greetings with the others without looking at the fellow. His friend, another poet named Amir Hassan Dehlvi, was more amiable. ‘Say brother Abdullah, how goes it with you?’ he asked. ‘
Al hamdu-Lillah,
’ I replied as I sat down.
Khusrau realized I had taken offence and tried to make up. ‘Brother Abdullah I have composed a new riddle for you in Hindi. Let us see if you can get it’:
Twenty I sliced, I cut off their heads
No life was lost, no blood was shed.
He had obviously put it to the others before I came. They said in a chorus, ‘This is really a clever one!’ I could make nothing of it. Khusrau reverted to his ill-mannered self. ‘Fool!’ he cried, ‘The answer is in the riddle itself. It is
nakhoon
. Don’t you see
nakhoon
means both nails and no blood? You have to have brains to work out Khusrau’s riddles.’
‘Allah gave you wisdom, Ishwar gave me the gift of good manners,’ I replied in as sharp a tone as I could manage. It hit the mark. Khusrau changed his tone. He was like that, blowing hot one minute blowing cold the next. ‘Don’t take it ill, brother,’ he said. ‘We are
dharam bhais
(brothers in faith). Try this one’:
All night he stayed with me.
Came the dawn and out he went;
At his going my heart bursts
O friend, was it my lover?
No friend, it was the ....
‘It was the...? It was the...?’ demanded Khusrau clicking his thumb and finger in my face. Fortunately someone gave an answer. ‘No friend, it was the lamp.’ Khusrau went on from riddle to riddle.
‘Bhai
, the prophecy that you will be greater than Khaqani of Persia has certainly been fulfilled,’ remarked one of his cronies. Khusrau did not deny it. ‘I am but the dust under the feet of the Khwaja Sahib! If the great Nizamuddin honours me with the title of
Toot-i-Hind
(The Nightingale of India) and calls me Shaikh Saadi of Hindustan, what power on earth can prevent me from becoming the greatest poet and singer of all time? It’s not I, it is divine spark that the Khwaja Sahib has lit in my bosom that shines in my wretched frame.
What could anyone say to such mock humility and such bare-faced bragging? It is true that as soon as someone achieves success, people vie with each other to discover newer facets of his genius. So it was about Khusrau. If one man said Khusrau was a great poet, another said he was a greater musician. If a third one said Khusrau was a great statesman, a fourth one would insist he was an even greater swordsman. Khusrau knew the art of spreading stories about himself. Since it was fashionable among Muslims to trace their ancestry to some foreign land, Khusrau who was darker than I and had more Indian blood than Turkish in his veins talked of Turkey as his ‘home’. The poetic pseudonyms he had chosen for himself were designed to convey nobility of birth, power and wealth. At first he was Sultani (drop the
i
at the end and it becomes Sultan). When he became Khusrau he added Ameer (rich) to it. God had given him brains and talent but had forgotten to temper His gifts with modesty. This braggart who compared himself to Shaikh Saadi had not read what had been written about people who chant their own praises:
It does not behove a man of wisdom
By his own tongue to praise himself;
What pleasure does a woman beget
If with her own hand she rubs her breast?
What a change came over Khusrau when the Khwaja Sahib made his appearance! He was like an actor who takes off a mask which has moustaches painted insolently upwards and puts on another which has them hanging down in humility. The arrogant boaster suddenly turned into an ardent hem-kisser and tear-shedder. And he alone of all the thousands present was always honoured by a pat on the head and a solicitous enquiry, ‘Is all well with you, Abdul Hassan?’
On my way back to Mehrauli, I was full of angry thoughts about Khusrau. How was it that other people could not see what a double-faced man he was? He had served innumerable masters. If anyone knew when to turn his back to the setting sun and worship the new one rising, it was Khusrau! He had first been with Sultan Balban’s nephew, Malik Chajjoo. How he had extolled Chajjoo! Then he had joined the sultan’s younger son and denounced Chajjoo. Next he’d served the heir-apparent; thereafter the ruler of Avadh. When the ruling dynasty was half-Hindu he boasted of the Hindu blood in his veins and extolled the greatness of Hindustan. He praised its
betel
leaves and its bananas, its chess players and musicians. When the ruler was a Muslim bigot, the same Khusrau proclaimed: ‘Do not count Hindus among men for they venerate the cow, regard the crow superior to the parrot and read omens in the braying of an ass!’ According to Khusrau what made India the greatest nation of the world was the fact that he, Khusrau, was Indian! I said to myself: this Khusrau is a cunning sycophant. Why should I waste so much of my time and temper on him! By the time the
ekka
pulled up at the stand outside the Auliya Masjid I had made my peace with Khusrau; for me he was just a successful joker, a
khusra
(a castrated male).
Ram Dulari heard my footsteps and undid the latch to let me in. Kamal was already asleep. She warmed milk for me and sat down beside me. I told her of what happened at Ghiaspur. I asked her the riddle about paring nails. She had heard of it and gave me the answer. I asked her about the other one of the ‘spending all night and going out at dawn.’ She nudged me in the belly: ‘Do you have anything else on your mind except this?’ I took her hand and put it on my member. ‘It’s not this, you silly woman! It is the lamp.’
She rose and blew out the lamp.
*
The years drifted by. Despite the thousands of conjugations in which our hips met to pump ecstasy into each other and the Jamna flood of semen which I poured into her—none of these efforts bore more fruit in Ram Dulari’s womb. The hair on my head thinned till there was none left. My right eye began to turn grey; antimonies prescribed by
hakeems
did not arrest the cataract which soon deprived me of the sight in my left eye. Ram Dulari’s hair also turned grey. No sooner did she stop menstruating than she started getting fleshy about her middle. Every time she had to get up from her
charpoy
, she had to rest her hands on her knees and invoke the assistance of Ramji. At times we lay on the same
charpoy
. But more often it was with our bottoms that we kissed each other than with our lips. We decided that Ishwar had given us enough and we should devote the days that remained to us in prayer.
Kamal had become a man. He had acquired knowledge of Turki and Persian at the
madrasa
at Hauz-i-Alai near Siri. I pleaded with the
Kotwal
Sahib, gave him a handsome
nazrana
of eleven gold
tankas
and got Kamal appointed in my place as a clerk in the
kotwali
. Ram Dulari found him a wife from among the daughters of one of the Kayastha families who frequented both the temple of Jogmaya and the hospice at Ghiaspur. From the way Kamal and his wife behaved, we were assured that our branch of the Kayasthas would not end with us.
We began to spend more time at the Khwaja Sahib’s hospice in Ghiaspur than in our home in Mehrauli. Then we rented rooms in Ghiaspur and began to live there. We went to Mehrauli to visit our son and daughter-in-law once every month. Kamal brought his wife to see us every Thursday.
We saw the Khwaja Sahib every day. Khusrau was also there more often than he used to be. The years had deprived him of his teeth and cleansed his tongue of its coating of sarcasm. He became quite friendly and began to address Ram Dulari as
bhabi
(sister-in-law). I responded to his friendship and we were often in each other’s homes.
What more could one ask for in old age? Peace, prayer, security, friends—all under the shade of a massive banyan tree—and our Khwaja Sahib, Beloved of God (
Mahboob-i-Ilahi
) and Beloved of Man! We lived in the world without being a part of it. We were like people who stroll through a bazaar without wanting to buy anything.
Rarely did the world intrude into our sanctum. One occasion that I recall was on the death of Sultan Alauddin Khilji. At first we heard that he had died in his sleep and that Malik Kafur, the slave he had raised to the rank of Commander, had taken over the administration till such time as a successor could be named by the
omarah
. Then we heard that Kafur had taken his master’s senior widow to his couch, put out the eyes of two princes and murdered many others. The Khwaja Sahib, who seldom bothered about the comings and goings of sultans, put his hands on his ears and exclaimed ‘
Tauba
!’ Even Ameer Khusrau who had, as he said himself, ‘woven a false story in every reign’ wrote a satire on Malik Kafur which he recited to a gathering in Ghiaspur. We knew that if our Khwaja Sahib said something against someone, he was sure to be punished. So it came to pass. The servants of the palace rose against Malik Kafur and slaked the thirst of their daggers in his vile blood.
Qutubuddin Mubarak Shah, who became the next sultan, did not like our Khwaja Sahib. It did not take flatterers much time to fan the ashes of hate that smouldered in the sultan’s breast into a vindictive flame. They said, ‘Nizamuddin tells people that he does not give a cowrie shell for anyone; he defies royal commands to lower Your Majesty in the eyes of Your Majesty’s subjects. (This was in reference to the Khwaja Sahib not attending Friday prayers in the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque). He spreads all manner of gossip about Your Majesty and Khusro Khan.’
Who was this Khusro Khan? He was a Hindu Pawar boy captured during an expedition to Gujarat. The men of Gujarat are handsome but effeminate. And, of the Gujaratis, Pawars are known to be the most handsome and at the same time the most womanlike. I never saw this fellow, but he was said to be fair, gazelle-eyed with eyebrows curving like scimitars and buttocks as large as a woman’s. By some quirk of fate the sultan who was known for his prodigious appetite for women turned his back upon his well-stocked harem of the beauties of Hindustan, Iran and Turkistan and fell in love with this boy from Gujarat. He had the fellow colour his lips and put
kohl
in his already dark eyes. They drank out of the same goblet. The royal
hakeem
was asked to prepare perfumed oil to smear on the boy’s bottom. Then yet another change came over the sultan. He started colouring his own lips, smearing his own bottom with scented oil and making the Pawar do to him what he had been doing to the Pawar. As details of the affair travelled from lip to ear more pepper and spice were added to it.
The Muslims were more upset by these goings-on than the Hindus. They said it was a disgrace that a manly Turk should allow an infidel to mount him as a horse mounts a mare. The sultan thought the Muslims were unhappy because his beloved was a Hindu. He ordered the boy to be converted to Islam and re-named Khusro Khan. The two celebrated the occasion by getting drunk and carousing with each other in the open. Bawdy jokes about the Gujarati stallion and the Turkish mare could be heard in the bazaars. They reached the sultan’s ears. The
ulema
who had reason to hate our Khwaja Sahib told the sultan that the source of all the filthy stories about him and Khusro Khan was the hospice at Ghiaspur.