This story is published in Postcolonial Text.
Postcolonial Text, Vol 1, No 2 (2005)
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The Last Nawab
General Harun-ur-Rashid, president for ten years, rested uneasily on my cane sofa, deposed, in mufti.
"This is the first election I'll be fighting, Zafar, and, as my philosopher-adviser, I expect you to win it for me."
"Being an equal stranger to democracy, sir, I
appreciate your fears, but I believe I understand the needs of the
people well enough to offer them, not only a leader, but a statesman."
"But how on earth are you going to get them to vote for me by showing them a cinema?"
I took the opportunity offered by my cup of
coffee on the glass-topped cane table to pause, by picking it up and
taking a long sip. I surveyed the General again - the close-cropped
black-and-grey crown, the large, protruding nose (a terrible temptation
to cartoonists, that), deep-set eyes, bushy moustache concealing a wide
mouth, the heavy jowls, the sturdy frame on which all these were set.
How, I wondered, was I going to explain to this citadel of practicality
and probity that the cinema was the modern amphitheatre, but that here,
in our country, the slaves were in the auditorium, and the free men
outside?
I was saved by the bell.
On answering the door, I found that a houri (albeit Europeanised) had floated up to my apartment on the fifth floor, past the concierge.
"You must be Zafar!" she exclaimed, nearly
clapping her hands but for the newspaper fluttering between her pale,
attenuated fingers. "The trusted vizier of" - her long legs, enclosed in
a chequered skirt, took long strides towards the General - "the Caliph
Harun-ur-Rashid!"
Entranced by her discovery, she looked from one
of us to the other, her dark, shoulder-length hair swirling in a black
mass. The General stared at the exquisitely fair creature with the ebony
eyes and Arabian features.
"A most unfortunate parallel, I'm afraid," I observed, "as the trusted vizier was ultimately beheaded by the doubting Caliph."
"Oh!" she nearly screamed, dropping the newspaper. I noticed the advertisement I'd placed for a role in the film.
"And since you seem to be familiar with our names, if not our titles, perhaps you'd like to tell us your name," I suggested.
"Abbasah," she mumbled.
I coughed, and the General turned a deeper shade of pink. "Named after the sister of that Caliph of Baghdad, no doubt."
"Yes!" She brightened immediately, her dark
eyes glistening in contrast to a dazzling set of white teeth. "And I
want to play the wife of The Last Nawab."
The General hadn't uttered a word so far. Now,
with a loud harrumph, he rose and politely excused himself. Stepping up
close to me, he muttered, "I hope you know what you're doing, Zafar."
"I hope so, sir."
He descended the stairs, repeating incredulously, "Caliph! Caliph! Baghdad! Caliph of Baghdad! Abbasah!......."
My gorgeous guest, meanwhile, had ensconced
herself in the General's vacated seat, legs crossed, revealing a pair of
white ankles. I occupied the same sofa, this time - she was terribly attractive - after picking up the newspaper containing the ad.
"So you want to play the wife of The Last Nawab, do you?"
"That's right."
"Why?"
"I want to feel her suffering as she watches
the East India Company come into her husband's kingdom, bribe her
relatives and generals and take it over." Her slender fingers bunched
into a fist as her brows knitted.
An instinct told me that I could use her, but
not as the Nawab's wife. I had not advertised for that role, anyway, but
one infinitely more demanding. For some reason, however, she had chosen
to ignore the ad in this respect.
"Can you dance?"
She looked at me uncomprehendingly.
"Like in a disco?" she asked, finally.
"Heavens, no! Like in the local films."
"Why, does the Begum dance like that...?"
"Like what?"
"You know," she shrugged a shoulder, looking as if she were handling a very dirty matter.
"You mean, obscenely," I suggested.
She nodded.
"Never mind that right now, let me see what you can do."
"Anything you say."
We moved the furniture around a little, and I
put on some music, and sat back. I watched her fleet slap the floor, her
skirt swirl around the room, and caught breathtaking glimpses of white
panties and lean, creamy thighs. She had three drawbacks - she was too
skinny, rather flat-chested and couldn't dance to save her life. As the
white armpits of her shirt began to perspire, she collapsed, panting -
into my lap. I encircled her in my arms and raised my mouth as she
lowered hers. What happened next decided for me unerringly that only she
could play the character I had in mind - an eighteenth-century
nautch-girl.
She jumped off my lap as though an electric
charge had run through her. I looked silly for a few seconds with my
arms in the air.
"Something wrong?" I managed to ask.
She had grown even more pallid, her nostrils, at the end of a ruler-straight nose, flaring. She sat clumsily.
"I can't make love to local boys."
I don't know which I objected to more, the local' or boys'.
"Only with foreigners, eh?"
"I must have been to bed with every diplomat in Baridhara." Baridhara was
a sort of diplomatic enclave, posh and white. I had a vision of those
naked limbs flailing around some ecstatic charg-d'affaires while his
wife bought the souvenirs which would later, somewhere in Europe, recall
that moment to her husband. Sheer envy.
"What's your real name?"
"Keshwar."
"Lovely Persian word."
"Really?" She brightened a little.
"Means country'."
She looked far out beyond the verandah into the sun.
"Country!" She hugged the word.
"Well, now I understand why you want to play the Nawab's anguished Begum."
"Yes, you do, don't you? Please give me the part!" She rose, hands joined imploringly.
"But I did not advertise for that role, Keshwar."
"I know! But I want the respect that goes with the title of Begum!"
"And the agony that goes with this particular one."
"You understand!" The colour began to seep back into her face.
I understood perfectly well, of course, and I
could also envisage at the end of this rainbow not only a great film but
the director's usual prerogative of sleeping with his leading lady.
Naturally, I didn't let the latter cloud my judgement about the former.
Besides, playing the Begum wouldn't be the right cathartic; and,
consequently, the wrong step in both directions.
Getting up, I said, "All right, you can have
the role," and found myself in a grateful pair of arms. Tearing myself
loose, I clarified, "You'll play Aleya."
"That whore!"
Keshwar slapped me so hard that I couldn't even see her slam the door.
***
"Ice-cream!"
The vendor came round to where we were - the
only people in the dress-circle - and produced two choc bars. I shook my
head at him, raised one finger, and pointed it at Keshwar.
"Why ice-cream?"
"Bury those collar bones. I want you to put on several pounds before the summer's out."
How did I get her inside a cinema hall? Well,
it wasn't hard. I knew she would call me within a few hours of her
stormy departure. We agreed on a quid pro quo: she gives me a
chance to change her mind while I get more time to see things from her
angle. So there she was, right next to me in the deserted DC of a local
hall, much changed in her outer appearance: she had a printed, red
kameez and white shalwar on, with a white dupatta. Her hair, parted in
the middle, hung in a pony-tail. She looked as delectable as the
ice-cream she bit off in that hot, stuffy latter-day amphitheatre.
The idea of freedom had turned the circular,
Greek amphitheatre - where all were equal like at King Arthur's round
table - into an elongated two-storied structure where the classes sat
apart, no longer free-unfree, but rich-poor. As I was trying to explain
to the General, in this country, the rich stayed perversely out of the
movie theatres altogether. We could hear the other half pouring noisily
into the rear and front stalls below.
"I don't get it. Why do I have to gain weight?"
"For the masses, dear girl, for the toilers of
the land, rickshawpullers and day-labourers. Look around you: do you see
anyone who would share your taste for an anorexic star? In the United
States, a third of all adults are overweight, so you have Cindy
Crawford. Here, the impoverished rickshawpuller doesn't want his wife -
his experience, his reality - reflected on that screen. Imagination is
the reverse of memory."
"But why aren't they here, you know, people like - us?"
"Because we share neither their memory, nor
their imagination. The audience below is illiterate to the last person.
They have no hope of ever clambering up here - from grandfather to
father to son, the inheritance of poverty has continued. And we don't
want our children to join them down below, do we? No snakes-and-ladders
business here, thank you."
"I think I'll have another one of these."
And the film began.
Three hours later we were collectively disgorged.
"Boy, it sure is cool outside compared to in there!"
"The air-conditioner was off," I explained, "to
save on electricity and taxes, because people who live in slums don't
mind the heat."
"Or the smoke," she added, with a grin.
"Rich boy meets poor girl, or poor girl meets
rich boy - I could have told you the plot before we even went in there.
Just look at their contented faces as they come out. They've seen a few
dances and justice done. Why, didn't the boy marry the girl in the end?
And didn't the villain get what was coming to him?"
"But the girl wasn't poor; she was, in fact,
the daughter of a very rich man, who had kicked his wife out without
knowing she was pregnant, so it turned out."
"The deus ex machina."
"The what?"
"The god brought on the stage to restore equilibrium. A rickshawpuller must not even be allowed to imagine that a poor girl can aspire to marry a rich man's son. That would be too revolutionary a rejection of his memory."
"You mean, it would be like a right...?"
"The two classes interacting - that's your rich
girl and poor boy. Their union would imply social justice. You see that
queue of rickshawpullers and garment-factory girls at the box-office?
You'll see them queue up again on election day, only there will be
gentlemen and ladies like ourselves among them. And what will we vote
for?"
"To keep things as they are, of course!"
"Exactly. The two classes that cannot interact on stage are forced to interact every five years on the national theatre."
"But the General stands for social justice."
"And more, which is why he doesn't stand a chance."
We walked away from the cinema hall. Rickshaws,
autorickshaws and cars killed all conversation. Only, I pointed out a
herd of black goats being led by a goat-herder, in a lungi and vest, carrying a stick.
"Remember that," I shouted above the noise.
"What about the goats?" she asked, when we were back in my flat, under a fan, sipping cold mango juice.
"The most vivid image of an idiot nation led by crafty aliens I could think of."
"Now, you've really lost me."
"Do you remember how the General was overthrown?"
"In a mass movement, I read."
"Rubbish. The masses are too busy digging or
pedalling to interfere in politics. By the parties, Keshwar, and" - I
paused significantly - "the donors".
She put her glass down, looking visibly flustered.
"You mean," she gulped, "the people I've been sleeping with."
I nodded, polishing off my mango juice.
"I'm sure you're somewhat familiar with international politics from your pillow-talk."
"No need to rub it in."
"You see, so long as the Berlin Wall was there,
the General was indispensable to foreigners. When the Wall collapsed,
so did the General's fortunes. Here's to the opposition and democracy,'
chorused the donors." I raised my empty glass. "And the ten years in
which the General had tried to make the people literate, healthy and
proud were reversed in five."
"What can we do?"
"Bring the nation together, not two nations at
war, rich and poor, but one, with a shared memory and a shared
imagination. That memory will be the Battle of Plassey when the last,
free Nawab was defeated by the East India Company. We must tell the
people that today the donors are playing the role of the East India
Company, deposing one ruler, installing another, and keeping the country
dependent on aid, with which we are forced to buy their stuff and hire
their people, the old exploitation with a modern twist. As for the
political parties, they are the treacherous relatives and generals of
the Nawab, men who sold their country in the international marketplace."
"So I suppose I am really cut out for Aleya's role." A cynical smile played at the corner of her mouth.
"Aleya was kidnapped by the Portuguese, and raped. Her class refused to accept her. She became an outcast, dclasse,
a nautch-girl - and a spy. Her profession and her fatal beauty gained
her intimacy with foreigners and natives alike, and their secrets. Her
redemption was the Nawab, to whom she reported every morning."
Neither of us spoke for a while. The summer light began to fail, and through the twilight floated the muezzin's call.
"What does her name mean?"
"Will-o'-the-wisp, ignis fatuus. She's
the foolish fire the audience must follow as she follows the last Nawab
to his ruin. I want to show the Nawab as suffering from a character
defect, a fatal flaw - trust. He trusted the English and his relatives,
with tragic consequences. Our message: you can trust the General because
he trusts no one. Imagination being the reverse of reality, the
audience must reject trust in their imagination, in order to choose the
General in real life. We'll use the catharsis of tragedy."
"What happens to her in the end?"
After a pause, I said, "She hangs."
Keshwar rose ever so slowly. Seemingly reluctant, she walked to the door in the semi-darkness. I heard it open.
"If I have to play Aleya to turn goats into human beings, let's go out and get more ice-cream.'
***
"Now, remember, you're trying to seduce Shah
Miron, the son of the arch-traitor, Mir Zafar Ali Khan. But he refuses
to take you to Kashim Bazaar Cottage, where all the conspirators are
meeting tonight - Mir Zafar, the Nawab's uncle, Jagath Seth, the banker,
the English officers. You're hell-bent on getting there, so you dance
like Salome to get him to take you along. Two emotions struggle for
mastery within you - your hatred for the treacherous man and his ilk,
and your love for Nawab Siraj-ud-dowla. Together, they inspire your most
magnificent dance in the play."
Keshwar stood before me now as Aleya - heavier,
in crimson shalwar-kameez, bejewelled, besequined, sparkling like the
diamond in her heart. She wore false, braided hair, reaching her waist,
and, at the same time, anachronistic make-up, from lipstick to
eye-shadow, since the audience of yokels would insist on the works. I
was giving her a talk to dissipate any feelings she had of being a
painted trollop. We stood facing each other, my hands on her shoulders,
in a makeshift greenroom, which, tomorrow morning, would revert to its
usual function as classroom in a village school.
"Don't worry for me, Zafar. I'll be proud to
dance before the village-folk you call yokels. Isn't this the General's
native village, where he grew up? I'll think only of them when I dance
for that bastard."
Both of us looked in the direction of the
General's voice as it boomed out of the megaphones from every corner of
the school-yard, the size of a soccer-field. Several thousand people,
clad only in lungi and shawl, huddled on the grass beneath a
cloudless, winter sky, a rural amphitheatre. The General, wrapped in a
green jacket, stood on the raised platform of planks, covered with an
awning, and enclosed on three sides with sheets of cloth, apart from a
rear-entrance not directly visible to the audience. A multitude of
fluorescent lamps lit up the bare interior. The only prop was a gaudy,
maroon throne.
"My beloved countrymen! I interrupt your drama
right before the meeting of the traitors because the scene should remind
you of what happened in this country, not only two hundred and fifty
years ago, but also five years ago. Like the Nawab, I was once a ruler.
Like him, I lost my throne. Who betrayed the Nawab in 1757? His own
relatives, who sold the country to the East India company. And who
betrayed me? Our own people, the political parties, and the so-called
educated ladies and gentlemen who would not sit down to watch this play
with you. Their ideas and their entertainment come from abroad. And the
idea that toppled me from power was democracy. But I ask you today: was
it a people's movement? Did you leave your fields and your homes to
march to the capital to demand my downfall? Did you, I ask you today?"
"No!" went up, in unison, towards the stars. "No! No!"
"I know!" resumed the General, choking with
suppressed tears. "And I knew it! And I will always know it to be true!
The political parties, with their mercenary followers, knifed me in the
back, as Mohammedi Beg, the hired executioner, will strangle the Nawab
tonight. And who encouraged them? The East India Company of today - the
foreign donors. If the foreign donors tell us to stand, we stand, if
they tell us to sit, we sit - and if they tell us to dethrone our
leader, we do that as well. Are we slaves or free men? Can we create a
country that will not depend on foreigners?"
"Yes!" rose up from every throat, the warm breath smoking in the cold.
"Can we build a nation where the poor man will not be ashamed before the rich, nor the rich man proud before the poor?"
"Yes!"
"Can we sit down, rich and poor together, and not be divided by foreign ideas and foreign money?"
"Yes! Yes! Yes!"
They were all on their feet, shaking their
fists, smiling their ingenuous, rustic smile. Yet if they decided to
give the General at least three consecutive terms in power, the
classroom from which Aleya now went forth would school them out of their
rural simplicity.
The tour was obviously going to be a success. And after the jatras
(as these village plays are called) would begin the shooting for the
movie, to be released in every cinema hall in the country, to run for
months before polling-day, a box-office hit. The masses have been coming
to these jatras since time lost to memory, The Last Nawab being their favourite for generations. Let's just say I transformed a tradition into an electoral strategy.
***
Surprise, observed a philosopher, is the test
of truth, so my assumption that Keshwar was still in bed with me proved
false when I reached out for her. I looked swiftly round the bedroom.
Her clothes weren't there. Getting into my dressing-gown, I made sure
she wasn't in the flat before starting to worry. I began, for some
reason, to look for a message.
It read like a suicide note. It had been signed twice, and both signatures had been cancelled: Abbasah, then Aleya. "They hit me where it hurt, Zafar, but at least I had one night with my local boy."
The crumpled newspaper on my table, next to the
note, proclaimed in its headline where they' had hit her. KESHWAR A
WHORE OFF-SCREEN, AS WELL, SAY PARTY-LEADERS.
The champions of democracy had held a press
conference yesterday evening. "Party leaders, while admiring Keshwar's
performance in the film The Last Nawab, which was released
yesterday in cinema halls all over the country, said that her convincing
portrayal of Aleya was due to the fact that in real life she preferred
to sleep with foreigners...."
I stepped out into the verandah for some fresh
air. After a few minutes, or perhaps a few hours, I heard the phone
ring. But the General and I hardly talked. I stepped back into the
verandah.
In the afternoon, the western sky darkened. It
was like broken pieces of slate set in silver. An invisible artist added
imperceptibly to the bits of slate, as though he were angry. The clouds
plodded eastward. A wind rose. The mango and jak-fruit trees between
the buildings began their frenzied dance. The new year had begun.
I dressed hurriedly for a walk. The rain
started, in tiny droplets, hesitatingly. Keshwar was everywhere. Tall
posters had been pasted on walls all over town. She stood in an attitude
of dance, teasing pedestrians, slowing them down. The Nawab on
horseback, and, in miniature portraits, his trusted lieutenants and
treasonous generals surrounded her.
The sky had promised a flood, but performed
only a drizzle, as if checked by a sudden clemency. The cinema hall
where she and I had watched our first film together appeared abruptly
before me. The gallery of rogues and heroes graced the facade of the
building, and, larger than life, Aleya danced above them. The trees
reached the end of their dervish-like ecstasy, and the dust settled in
the rain.
Two queues of men and women waited patiently, a
little wet, before the two counters - one for the dress circle, the
other for the rear and front stalls. The women in the former column
exuded perfume and good breeding, while the men hovered proprietorially
around them, listening to hand-held radios.
"Any news of Keshwar?" I heard one of the ladies ask gloomily. Her husband shook his head.
An instinct urged me up the flight of stairs to
the dress circle. Behind me, I heard somebody yell. " - Found - hotel
room - overdose - alcohol and sleeping tablets - ," reached me.
The matine was nearly over when I stepped into
the semi-darkness. The DC was full. I heard women snuffle and caught
glimpses of white handkerchiefs. They were hanging Aleya.
"They killed her in real life, too!" said an angry male voice.
"No!" came the feminine denial. "No! She'll never die!"
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