Saeeda, the spokesperson, with occasional clarifications and elucidations from the others, described Anjum’s altered behavior as carefully as she could—the brooding, the rudeness, the reading and, most seriously, the insubordination. She told the doctor about Zainab’s illnesses and Anjum’s anxiety. (Of course she had no means of knowing about Anjum’s sifli jaadu theory and her own part in it.) The delegation had, after detailed consultations with each other, decided to leave Gujarat out of it because:
(a) They didn’t know what, if anything, had happened to Anjum there.
And,
(b) Because Dr. Bhagat had a biggish silver (or perhaps it was only silver-plated) statue of Lord Ganesh on his table and there was always smoke from a fresh incense stick curling up his trunk.
Certainly there were no concrete conclusions to be drawn from this latter fact, but it made them unsure of his views on what had happened in Gujarat. So they decided to err on the side of abundant caution.
Dr. Bhagat (who, like millions of other believing Hindus, was in fact appalled by the turn of events in Gujarat) listened attentively, sniffing and tapping the table with his pen, his bright, beady eyes magnified by thick lenses set in gold-framed spectacles. He furrowed his brow and thought for a minute about what he had been told and then asked whether Anjum’s wanting to leave the Khwabgah had led to the Reading or the Reading had led to her wanting to leave. The delegation was divided on the issue. One of the younger delegates, Meher, said that Anjum had told her that she wanted to move back to the Duniya and help the poor. This set off a flurry of merriment. Dr. Bhagat, not smiling, asked them why they thought it so funny.
“Arre, Doctor Sahib, which Poor would want to be helped by us?” Meher said, and they all giggled at the idea of intimidating poor people with offers of help.
On his prescription pad Dr. Bhagat wrote in tiny, neat handwriting: Patient formerly of outgoing, obedient, jolly-type nature now exhibits disobedient, revolting-type of personality.
He told them not to worry. He wrote them a prescription. The pills (the ones that he always prescribed to everybody) would calm her down, he said, and give her a few good nights’ sleep, after which he would need to see her personally.
—
Anjum flatly refused to take the pills.
As the days passed, her quietness gave way to something else, something restless and edgy. It coursed through her veins like an insidious uprising, a mad insurrection against a lifetime of spurious happiness she felt she had been sentenced to.
She added Dr. Bhagat’s prescription to the things she had piled up in the courtyard, things she had once treasured, and lit a match. Among the incinerated items were:
Three documentary films (about her)
Two glossy coffee-table books of photographs (of her)
Seven photo features in foreign magazines (about her)
An album of press clippings from foreign newspapers in more than thirteen languages including the New York Times, the London Times, the Guardian, the Boston Globe, the Globe and Mail, Le Monde, Corriere della Sera, La Stampa and Die Zeit (about her).
The smoke from the fire rose and made everybody, including the goat, cough. When the ash cooled, she rubbed it into her face and hair. That night Zainab moved her clothes, shoes, school bag and rocket-shaped pencil box into Saeeda’s cupboard. She refused to sleep with Anjum any more.
“Mummy’s never happy,” was the precise, merciless reason she gave.
Heartbroken, Anjum emptied her Godrej almirah and packed her finery—her satin ghararas and sequined saris, her jhumkas, anklets and glass bangles—into tin trunks. She made herself two Pathan suits, one pigeon gray and one mud brown; she bought a second-hand plastic anorak and a pair of men’s shoes that she wore without socks. A battered Tempo arrived and the almirah and tin trunks were loaded on to it. She left without saying where she was going.
Even then, nobody took her seriously. They were sure she’d be back.
ONLY A TEN-MINUTE TEMPO RIDE from the Khwabgah, once again Anjum entered another world.
It was an unprepossessing graveyard, run-down, not very big and used only occasionally. Its northern boundary abutted a government hospital and mortuary where the bodies of the city’s vagrants and unclaimed dead were warehoused until the police decided how to dispose of them. Most were taken to the city crematorium. If they were recognizably Muslim they were buried in unmarked graves that disappeared over time and contributed to the richness of the soil and the unusual lushness of the old trees.