Mohammedan head of that department, a portly lady with voluminous
skirts trailing behind her, and red betel-stained teeth. There was no
one in the school from the top story to the bottom who was the equal
in deportment of Mumtaza Mihr--un--nissa Begum, whose father had been
Munshi to some dead-and-gone Mogul. To begin with, she could silence
every one with Persian epithets, and the pebbles of her polished
speech hit hard. "These may Providence protect, but God hath sent this
proof of his bounty to a handmaiden who is 'second-year student.'
What! are we to reduce this gift of the Most High to a standard
beneath its birth? Let Hoshiaribi, out of her plenty, appoint a
wet-nurse, or let its amiable aunt supply it with 'Maw' at four annas.
To allow her a primary pass without due qualification, in my poor
thought, is non-regulation; and, in addition, a bad precedent."
Mumtaza mihr-un-nissa bowed her sleek, net-veiled head, and threw out
her podgy fat hands, as if deprecating her own opinions.
For all that, Fatma stayed among the infants, and spent most of her
time on the wide stairs with the yellow-legged baby, while Peru joked
shamelessly with Chundoo on the sunshiny steps, and Hoshiaribi, in the
academic silence up-stairs, worked a crewel antimacassar between the
equations. It suited her indolent, comfort-loving nature. Ever since
she entered the school, nearly sixteen years ago, she had been in
receipt of a scholarship of sorts. At the beginning influence may have
had something to do with her good fortune, for her mother was only a
poor, good-looking Cashmiri, and her reputed father dead. But since
then she had justified her selection. If not clever, she was studious,
and quite understood that learning meant livelihood. In the good old
days when the one great object was to catch and keep a scholar, this
might have gone on indefinitely; but now, under new rules,
Hoshiaribi's scholarship would cease in a year, whether she passed or
did not pass. Then she must become a teacher, or starve on Peru's five
rupees.
The prospect was not pleasing. It would be a very different thing
having to worry over thirty unwilling pupils in a poky little room,
spending part of your own pay in bribes so as to get the grant for
attendance, and then never knowing from day to day if some neighbourly
spite would not result in empty mats on inspection-days.
"But if you pass," suggested a Hindu widow in her class, "you can go
on, as I am doing, into the medical school. That is two years' more
scholarship, and certain employment afterwards."
"'Tis all very well for you," muttered Hoshiaribi, sullenly. "You only
came in three years ago. I have been here all my life. I like it. I
don't want to go home and nurse the babies. I don't want to work. The
committee paid me to learn, and I have learned. I will learn anything
else they like. Why, then, should they take away my scholarship?"
"How foolish you are!" said the little Bengali; "you don't seem to
_understand_ what a _scholarship_ is."
"Perhaps I don't," retorted Hoshiaribi, flushing up. "My fathers were
not scriveners and quill-drivers since creation, like yours. My people
are poor. If I go home I must spin and grind corn. I will not. I tell
you _I will not!_ That is an end of it."
"Then you must teach."
"I don't want to teach. I want to stay here and learn."
"Be quiet, girls!" reproved the English teacher. "Do stick to your
lessons, and remember why you come here. Think, just think, of the
money that is being spent on your education!"
Hoshiaribi gave a triumphant glance at the Bengali girl. That was it.
They had paid her to learn, and she had learned. The rest was an
injustice.
II.
A loud, resounding slap, another, and another! A torrent of irrelevant
abuse in a strange tongue. Then something which is the same all over
the world--a fit of hysterics.
Hoshiaribi, as she stormed and sobbed and laughed, might have been any
spoiled, overwrought young woman in any country.
That was an end of everything. After slaving for months, after doing
without a new bodice in order to pay the ungrateful imps, after
cozening and flattering their stupid, cow-like mothers, it had come to
this: that Sultani, on whose performances Hoshiari relied for a fair
inspection, had divided four thousand one hundred and seven by six
thousand three hundred and two. She had not only tried to divide
it--she had divided it--with a quotient of fifty-six, and a remainder
of five thousand and three. It was too much--too much in every way;
with Peru lounging all day at the Central flirting with Chundoo,
Fatma thinking of nothing but the babies, the gold edge on the dress
she must wear at the wedding next week wanting renewal, and
inspection-day next month.
She propped herself up against the whitewashed wall at one end of the
room, Sultani, the injured prize pupil, at the other, and the two
sobbed vindictively across the intervening space, while a connecting
circle of alphabet-learners whimpered in sympathy with some one,
which, they scarcely knew, for they were mites of babies, not six
years old any of them.
The women up and down the central stair, which served also as a sort
of drain and dust-bin, came attracted by the hope of a scene, to
discuss the whole aspect of the affair without the least reserve. Peru
was a bad lot, and it was sheer tyranny of the _Sirkar_ to have
refused Hoshiar a scholarship after all these years. At the same time
she was a poor, flighty creature, and had no business to slap their
children; the latter train of thought becoming accentuated by the
arrival from a neighbouring tenement of Sultani's mother. Was it for
this her daughter had been bribed away shamelessly for a neighbouring
"missen," where, if they did read the Bible and try to pervert the
scholars, they made up for it in prizes? Was it for this that
base-born brat of a base-born mother had taken one rupee a month out
of Hoshiar's own pocket? These two questions were the theses of a
controversy, which spread like wild-fire till it embraced the personal
history of every one present, and the room was a seething mass of
excited women, bordered by a whimpering circle of small girls, until a
little figure came rushing up the stairs and forced itself into the
thickest of the clamour.
It was Fatma returning from her daily marketing. Her already scrimped
veil was further abridged by all the corners being utilized as bags
for her various purchases; and as she flung out her skinny brown arms
in the small space still left between the combatants, and turned first
to one side and then to the other in vociferous reproach, her weighted
veil swung out, leaving her body quite bare. It was not much bigger;
certainly no fatter than it had been, eighteen months gone, when she
had struggled up the ladder of learning with the yellow-legged baby.
"_Ari_, mothers! _Ari_, sisters!" she scolded in her thin child's
voice. "This is unseemly! This is a deplorable word! Have you
forgotten this house is a school? You come here to learn, not to make
beast-like noises! What a bad example! Does not shame come to you?"
The fateful phrases, which had so often reduced the infant department
to tears, fell powerless, and Fatma's own imperious temper asserted
itself. She turned like a whirlwind to the alphabet-learners; they
were her special charge, they at least should obey her.
"Come, my daughters," she cried, "let us leave this scene of infamy.
This is no place for us people. Come, let us go!"
The circle stood up instinctively. They adored Fatma; besides, the
chance of escape was welcome. She thrust her new nephew, a babe of
three months, who had been squalling patiently in a corner, into the
biggest girl's arms, seized on the yellow-legged one herself, and so,
full of dignity, headed the little procession.
The women, touched by the passionate delight in children's ways which
is so marked among them, fell back with sudden laughter.
"_Ai! dil aziz! Wah_, the little marionettes. See how they go like old
women! Heart's-core! are we so wicked? Look at my Amma, Fuzli--not
four, I swear, and grave as a judge! _Tobah! tobah!_ Go not, little
lives. We are sorry. See, we bite our tongues, we hold our ears."
So, squatting down, standing aside, reaching over, the women,
chattering their amusement, let the babies pass. And, as for Fatma,
she was "_pucki, burri pucki_." God knows why, but the bairns were set
to obey her. This one's Miriam, not four till _Baisakh_, leaped out of
bed at her first call, as she came her morning rounds for the pupils,
and that one's Janet had been known to refuse her breakfast if Fatma
said it was late. Aye--_pucki, burri pucki_--for good, not evil, and
'twere well others were more like her. So, with side sniffs, they
pattered up and down the stairs to their several abodes, leaving
Hoshiaribi sulkily exhausted. Sultani and her mother, as they went
casting glances of final scorn at the odd little row of maidens ranged
along the gutter in the sunshine, piping away the incontrovertible
fact that "_one and one make two--oo--oo_" while Fatma and her babies
sat opposite on a door-step and led the chorus.
So that was an end of the incident for one day. Unfortunately, it was
not the first of its kind, and Hoshiaribi had almost made up her mind
that it should be the last. She lay, feeling a perfect worm, as any
woman, East or West, might have done after the turmoil, kicking one
heel petulantly over the side of the string-bed on which she had flung
herself, and looked at the map of Asia and the map of Europe, which
hung on opposite walls, with equal abhorrence. She hated everything,
everybody. The last six months, since her failure to pass had sent her
as a favour to the lowest pay of a branch-school teacher, had been
sheer misery to her. For her husband's neglect she did not care, save
in so far as it gave her complaint a sound basis. She had been
betrothed to him, and so she had married him; but the six years since
she had lived with him as his wife had only taught her that she could
set her duty to him aside without reproach, for the sake of ten rupees
a month, and that he was quite content with this arrangement. She
looked once more round the long, narrow slip of a room with its mud
floor, its smoky rafters, its single-shuttered window two feet square,
giving on a close alley; then she thought of the cool, matted
corridors of the Genoese palazzo, the leisurely studies, the ease of
ten rupees compared with six, and rolled over, face down on the bed,
whimpering. She hated teaching, but it was that or starvation. At
least--unless--
Some one came jingling up the stairs, heralded by a strong smell of
musk. Hoshiaribi set up frowning; for all that, content to be
interrupted, since Meran bibi, reputation or no reputation, was at any
rate able to talk. At least she knew something of the world beyond
that swarming yet dead-alive Cashmiri quarter, for she had been
show-pupil for years at another branch school, knew the three first
readers by heart, and, after a somewhat tarnished girlhood, had
married a policeman; consequently, she was not a woman to be scorned
in the quarter, just because folks' tongues had cause to wag. She was
a buxom person, with oily hair, great bosses of silver tassels in her
ears, and a perfunctory veil of Manchester hitched on to the very back
of her head and drawn tight over her high bust. Finally, she had the
usual shrill voice in which she could always tell her gossip of the
latest "fassen" in the cutting of a bodice or the number of suits in a
bride's trousseau, for she came of a tailor family, and spent all her
days in gadding about, despite her pretence to the _purdah_; an
institution which is, as a rule, only inviolable when exotic
benevolence seeks to interfere with it.
She and Hoshiaribi fell on each other's necks in an elaborate stage
embrace, and then crouched up side by side upon the string-bed.
After a time, however, Hoshiaribi moved to put her head out of the
window and call to Fatma below:
"Send those brats away--it must be close on four--and make some tea.
My head aches."
Surely, when the Creator made women with his right hand, his left must
have been busy over tea. These two groups had it sickly sweet,
cinnamon-flavoured, in little basins with an English flag, and "Union
is Strength" upon them in gay colours.
"Yea, 'tis true, Hoshiaribi. A star of emerald with a red centre,
three crinkles of gold lace, like a 'heart's comfort' in pattern on
the breast, and two rows of seed-pearls round the collar. Then the
bridal dress! To begin with, a full skirt--for, look you, the newest
'fassen' is six breadths, gored--"
So on, and so on, while the map of Europe winked at the map of Asia;
and Fatma, after making the tea, was kneading as for dear life at the
dough of bare flour and water which, with the smear of some curd, was
to form the household dinner.
"Thou couldst see it easily," continued Meran, "and thou deservedst
something to cheer thee after those senseless fools. Come! I could
take thee by the Mori gate, a step from here; so into the gardens.
Lord! how they smell of orange blossoms--like any bride. Then we could
come home by the Badami bazar. To think thou hast never seen these
things, and thou so clever--one who has learned wisdom of the
_sahibs_! _Wah!_ it tickles me."
Meran's peal of laughter crackled like thorns, and Hoshiaribi flushed
up.
"I could have gone had I wished. Peru should not stop me. But I have
not chosen."
"Peru! Why, I tell thee, Hoshiaribi, he will marry the widow Chundoo.
Tchut! what matters it if thou art not a fool, slaving away to no
purpose? Look you, they wanted me to keep school. Not I! Come,
Hoshiaribi, 'twill do thy head good. I have to buy new tinsel for a
_kurta_, and the bazar is worth seeing. A fair for noise, with the
criers selling sugar-cane and fresh fritters. The shops full of
jewels, the people crowding, the soldiers marching up and down, the
_mem-sahibas_ in their carriages, and, above all, the wooden balconies
with the girls in white nodding and smiling; but the great ones like
Chandni, of Delhi, stand up and salaam as the big folk go by. Yet she
is naught to look at. Thou wouldst be twice her match for looks wert
thou not so pale."
Half an hour afterwards Fatma was alone in the room. The babies were
asleep, so she had taken out a sort of lapstone, and was busy punching
gilt thread into stars through the front of a shoe upper. That, by
rights, was Peru's hereditary trade, which he had deserted in favour
of _dhooli_ bearing and a fixed salary of five rupees a month. It
came, therefore, more naturally than anything else to Fatma, and so,
when the babies left leisure, she earned a pice or two by sweating for
an old woman and her crippled grandson who lived up the same stair and
were employed by a big shop. But for these odd earnings life could not
have gone on at all, what with Hoshiaribi's tea, and Peru's inroads
for dinner or supper when he was short himself.
There he was, even now, coming up the stair lazily. Fatma had put away
her lapstone ere he arrived, and was ready to greet him with calm
contumely, even while she set two cakes a toasting in the embers, and
brought out the green leaf of curds. If the one was his right, as
master of the house, the other was hers as mistress; and she exercised
it fully, Hoshiaribi being away with Mai Rajjun, who had a new baby;
for Fatma had no scruples about abstract truth when face to face with
the absence of a wife and the presence of an inquiring husband. With
that same unconscious knowledge that it was the right thing to do
which had made her jog the baby's cerebellum to keep it quiet, she
lied cheerfully to avoid possible disturbance. Peru accepted the
explanation with a like indifference to its truth. To begin with, that
same indifference to all save appearance is a common feature among
husbands; and then Peru would not have been exactly sorry to feel
cause of complaint. It would have balanced his own indiscretion.
Briefly, he had married Chundoo two days before, and had come to break
the fact to his first wife. There must be something painfully bald
about such a statement to European readers. When fully one half of
harrowing modern fiction is based upon the axiom that Thingumbob,
having married So-and-So, cannot possibly marry What's-his-name also,
it takes the starch out of a story when a hero can have as many wives
as he likes, and his religion counsels four.
The facts in this case were extremely bald. Chundoo, the chaperone, an
elderly widow, had taken a fancy to the handsome young scamp; and
having been appointed doorkeeper to a new female hospital, thought it
more respectable to have a man of her own. Then, _dhooli_-bearers got
six rupees at the hospital, instead of five at the school. That,
sordid as it may seem, was why Peru had news to tell. The reason for
his telling it was this: he knew perfectly well that Hoshiaribi would
never consent to live in the same house as Chundoo, and so his
responsibility for her maintenance would cease, as he could plead
poverty against any claim for separate alimony. As for her pay as a
teacher, that, if Central school gossip said true, would not be for
long; but Fatma would look after the babies somehow. Such were his
thoughts as he sat watching the child's odd little figure busy over
the cakes, which he did not want, seeing that his new bride had given
him _kababs_ and _bakkharkana_ for breakfast. He had a sort of
affection for Fatma, who was the only relation he had in that part of
the world. He did not mean her to starve, and, if she could not
manage, it would be easy to give a rupee or two on the sly. What he
_did_ want was to keep Chundoo in a good temper, by showing
conclusively that Hoshiaribi had no hold on his affections.
To be sure, he had shown this illegally for some months back, but now
law and order demanded something legitimate; so he would respectfully
command her to come and live with Chundoo, and, when she refused, be
quit of responsibility: for polygamy is made for the virtuous, not for
the vicious.
Suddenly Fatma looked at him, sniffed, and looked at him again.
"Thou hast been to a wedding--whose?" she asked, suspiciously. In
truth, an odour of orange blossom and _attar_ began to be apparent in
the close room. Peru coughed, hesitated; it was a good beginning, and
might save him a scene with his wife; so he began.
"H'm!" commented Fatma; "then that's an end of bread for your stomach.
God be praised!" That is how it struck her.
"Little imp of sin!" cried Peru, seizing her half roughly, half
jestingly, by the shoulder. "Keep a quieter tongue in thy head, or
I'll find a husband to gag thee."
She gave a shrill laugh of scorn, and twisted herself from his hold.
"A husband, indeed! Then Chundoo will take the babies? _Ai budzart!_
Think not I do not understand. Let be. They are my babies, not thine;
and, thank God, I go not to bed hungry this night."
She sat herself down on the floor as she spoke, and began calmly on
the cakes she had been toasting.
"Go, my brother--go back to thy Chundoo," she said, eying him
disdainfully--from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot,
dissolute idler was writ all over him--"Go! we have no need of thee."
Then her dignity gave way; she leaped to her feet, scattering the
broken cakes upon the floor, and the echoes of her plain speaking
followed him down-stairs and flooded up into the room where Lalu the
cripple sat, with a ray of sunlight glittering on the gold thread he
was laying on the leather.
"Heaven save her husband!" he muttered good-humoredly. Then he sighed.
Perhaps the thought that he would never have even a shrewish wife
oppressed him. When his grandmother died he would be quite alone in
the dark room, with the glittering thread which seemed to make the
darkness more dingy and dreary. He was a young man of five-and-twenty,
who might stand years of imprisonment in those four walls,
with--Heaven be praised!--a scrap of roof open to the sunlight beyond;
that is to say, if he could pay the rent. He looked down at his fine,
supple hands and smiled, knowing that so long as they were left there
was no fear. If only the rest of him had been to match, instead of
marred, twisted, helpless!
"'Tis God's will," he said half aloud, as fervently as any Christian;
for there are saints of all creeds, and this poor cripple, up three
flights of stairs in the Cashmiri quarter, was one of them. Then he
took to thinking tenderly of the odd little girl downstairs, whom his
grandmother did out of the uttermost farthing. Poor little soul! when
he was alone he would at least be able to give her what was due.
Meanwhile Fatma, down-stairs, was nursing her childish yet all too
comprehending wrath against Peru for Hoshiaribi's return. Would she
not be angry? It would serve Peru right if she went off straight to
Chundoo's house and clawed her.
The room, with its one small window, darkened early. Fatma put the
babies to sleep and went out into the alley to watch, eager to give
the first words of disaster. After a time she ventured round the
corner. No one. A little farther. No one. Down the next turn. No one
still. Perhaps she had chosen the other way. Back up the now pitchy
stairs to the dim room. No one there save the sleeping babies. Fatma's
wrath--cooled, rose again against the loiterer, had time to cool again
into dismay. She knew well enough, young as she was, what Meran's
guidance might mean in the Badami bazar. For all that she waited
patiently, crouching on the stairs, peering down into the darkness,
watching, listening for the shuffling footstep of a veiled
woman--watching and waiting stolidly, without fear or blame.
Such things were, and neither Peru nor Hoshiaribi counted for much
with her save as extra appetites for dinner. When ten o'clock chimed
from the police station gong at the Mori gate, she went back to the
room and drew the bolt of the door. All was dark, save where a ray of
moonlight shone through a chink in the shutter. She stole over to
this, and, standing in the bar of light, undid a knot in the corner of
her veil. One, two, three annas, some pice, and a few cowries.
If the worst came to the worst, and Hoshiaribi did not come back, that
would buy a "Maw" at the gimcrack shop round the corner. So she
cuddled up on the bed beside the babies contentedly.
III.
"_One and one make two--oo--oo,
Two and two make four--or--or_."
"That is enough, my daughters," said Fatma, royally. "Miream and Anna
will play with Mohammed Ali; Janet and Kareem will take Ahmad Hassan
for a walk down the alley and back again. The rest of you will sit
still and think how good you are going to be to-morrow."