The House on Bahadur Shah Zafar Road

“You must get engaged before you leave,” my mother announces at breakfast one morning in July. I’ve decided to skip school today, but haven’t told my parents.

My father nods in agreement. “Plenty of good girls, where your mother came from.”

“Daanish!” my mother silences him.

A new feeling of dejection has come over me. Zainab’s departure is only a few weeks away. She’s been collecting her things from her quarters and assembling them outside her door, as though putting together the remains of a deceased relative she barely knew. But she doesn’t complain. Her condition is now more obvious for everyone to note.

“I’m not just talking about anyone, Abid,” my mother goes on. “Mishal is a good girl. You seem to like her. I think she has a promising future. Her mother has dropped hints the family might be interested. After all, we have a reputation too. What is it we can’t offer?”

I switch strategies. Until now, I’ve always resisted. “Okay, go ahead then. I like her too.”

My mother is shocked. She never expected me to bend so easily. “But…but…what will I say your long-term plans are? What will I say—”

I smile triumphantly. “You wanted a match, you got it.” I leave my toast unfinished. When I look back from the dining room door, her face has turned blue. It’s all bravado and bluff. They never expect sons to be easy.

**

Several times this summer—it’s August now—the monsoons have threatened but not yet come. There have been years in the past when there has been no rain. I’ve spent summers in London with cousins, and when it rains there, it doesn’t mean so much. Life goes on. I can’t imagine how Arthur Conan Doyle conveyed such menace with description of fog. Londoners have internalized the deepest, brownest, sickliest fog in their psyches. But when it rains here, the skies splatter open, as if Mr. Hyde had taken a knife to a beautiful woman, ripping her apart, smiling thunderously over her remains. It’s a brutal rain here, like everything else. Still, it’s nice to go to the roof, and lie naked in the stream of water, afloat in the roaring flood that makes it look as if the roof will go under, the house will crumble. The rain here is destructive.

I hope this doesn’t sound like my father trying to be poetic. I resent his being an engineer only a little less than my being an only child.

I venture into one of the rooms meant to be off-limits. My great-grandmother is supposed to have died there. She was one hundred and six, and remembered the Indian Mutiny well. The War of Independence, as they call it in the local Urdu-medium schools. She’s said to have rebuffed the approaches of prominent U.P. landowners, preferring to marry a sad, dislocated writer from Agra, whose family had fallen on hard times. Competent charcoal portraits of him adorn this room, evoking a sense of futility in the face of great historical change that I find hypnotizing.

He looks like a young T. S. Eliot, without the missionary zeal. He’s invariably dressed in black sherwani. I had Zainab steal a key of this room for me, from my mother’s treasure trove.

I fall asleep on the velvet bedspread covering the grand  four-poster bed that must have needed a miracle to be carried inside. The teak doors in the house spread wide, to try to accommodate just such furniture. Once it’s there, it’s never meant to be moved. Not even Zainab is delegated the job of cleaning this room. It’s the job of an older male servant, who never had any family.

**