I was never entirely sure what the relationship between Musa—Musa Yeswi—and Tilo really was. They were quiet with each other in company, never demonstrative. Sometimes they seemed more like siblings than lovers. They were classmates in Architecture School. Both exceptionally gifted artists. I had seen some of their work, Tilo’s charcoal and crayon portraits, Musa’s watercolors of the ruins of the older cities of Delhi, Tughlakabad, Feroz Shah Kotla and Purana Qila, and his pencil drawings of horses—sometimes just parts of horses—a head, an eye, a wild mane, galloping hooves. I once asked him about those, whether he drew them from photographs or copied them from illustrations in books, or whether he had horses at home in Kashmir. He said he dreamed about them. I found that disquieting. I don’t pretend to know much about art, but to my layman’s eye, those drawings, both his and Tilo’s, looked distinctive and dazzling. I remember they both had similar handwriting—that casual, angular calligraphy that used to be taught in architecture schools before everything came to be computerized.
I can’t say that I knew Musa well. He was a quiet, conservatively dressed boy, compactly built and only about as tall as Tilo was. His reticence may have had something to do with the fact that his English wasn’t fluent and he spoke it with a distinctly Kashmiri accent. He had a way of being in company without drawing any attention to himself, which was something of a skill, because he was striking-looking, in the way many young Kashmiri men can be. Though he wasn’t tall, he was broad-shouldered, and there was a concealed sinewiness to his compactness. He had jet-black hair, which he wore cropped very short. His eyes were a dark browngreen. He was clean-shaven, his smooth, pale skin a sharp contrast to Tilo’s complexion. I remember two things about him clearly: a chipped front tooth (which made him look ridiculously young when he smiled, which he seldom did) and his surprising hands—they were not the hands of an artist at all—they were a peasant’s hands, big and strong, with stocky fingers.
There was a gentleness to Musa, a serenity, which I liked, although it was probably those very qualities that coalesced into something dreadful later on. I’m certain he was aware of what I felt about Tilo, yet he showed no signs of feeling either threatened or triumphant. That, in my eyes, gave him tremendous dignity. In his relationship with Naga I think there was less equanimity, which in all probability had more to do with Naga than with Musa. Naga showed a peculiar insecurity and lack of grace when he was around Musa.
The contrast between the two of them was remarkable. If Musa was (or at least gave the impression of being) solid, dependable, a rock—Naga was breezy and mercurial. It was impossible to relax around him. He couldn’t be in a room without directing all the attention towards himself. He was a great showman; boisterous, witty, a bit of a bully, and utterly, hilariously merciless with the people he chose to publicly pick on. He was nice-looking, slim, boyish, a good cricketer (off-spinner), with floppy hair and glasses—very much the cool, intellectual sportsman. But more than his looks, it was his roguish appeal that girls seemed to love. They flocked around him giddily, hanging on to his every word, giggling at his jokes even when they weren’t funny. It was hard to keep track of his string of girlfriends. He had that chameleon-like quality that good actors have—the ability to alter his physical appearance, not superficially, but radically, depending on who he had decided to be at that particular moment in his life. When we were young, it was all very entertaining and exhilarating. Everybody looked forward to what Naga’s newest avatar was going to be. But as we grew older it became a little hollow and tiresome.
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After they graduated from Architecture School, Musa and Tilo seemed to have drifted apart. He returned to Kashmir. She got a job as a junior architect in an architectural firm. Her main responsibility at work, she told me, was to take the blame for other people’s mistakes. With her meager salary (she was paid by the hour) she upgraded herself from the slum and rented a ramshackle room near the dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya. I visited her there a few times.
On the last of those visits we sat by Mirza Ghalib’s grave, in a pool of beedi and cigarette stubs, surrounded by the spectacular cripples, lepers, vagrants and freaks who always accumulate around holy places in India, and drank some thick, terrible tea.
“This is how we treat the memory of our greatest poet,” I remember saying, somewhat pretentiously—at the time I knew nothing of Ghalib’s poetry. (I do now. I have to. For professional reasons. Because nothing warms the subcontinental Muslim’s heart more than a few well-chosen lines of Urdu verse.)
“Maybe he’s happier this way,” she said.
Later we walked through the beggar-lined lanes to the dargah for the Thursday-night qawwali. It wasn’t the best qawwali I had ever heard, but the foreign tourists closed their eyes and swayed in ecstasy.
After the last song was sung, and the musicians packed away their battered instruments, we walked down the dark road that ran behind the colony, along the banks of a storm-water drain that smelled like a sewer, and climbed the steep, narrow stairs to her room. Her dusty terrace was stacked with someone’s—probably her landlord’s—discarded furniture, the wood bleached white by the sun. A ginger tomcat yowled in sexual desperation for the female who had barricaded herself inside a nest of loose wicker that had come undone from the seat of a broken chair. I probably remember him so clearly because he reminded me of myself.
The room was tiny, more like a storeroom than a room. It was bare except for a string cot, a terracotta matka for water and a cardboard carton with clothes and some books. An electric ring on an old jeep windscreen propped up on bricks functioned as the kitchen. A skillful, larger-than-life crayon drawing of an iridescent, purple-blue rooster took up one whole wall and regarded us with a stern yellow eye. It was as though, to make up for the lack of real ones, Tilo had conjured up a graffiti parent to keep an eye on her.
I was relieved to escape the rooster’s irascible gaze when we went out on to the terrace. We smoked some hashish, got bitten by mosquitoes and laughed a lot at absolutely nothing. Tilo sat cross-legged, perched on top of the parapet wall, looking out at the darkness. A mottled moon rose, its other-worldly beauty at odds with the sharp, very worldly fumes from the open drain across the road. Suddenly a stone spun up at us from the street below, missing Tilo by a whisker. She jumped off the wall, but did not seem unduly perturbed.
“It’s the crowd from the cinema hall. The last show must be over.”
I looked down. I could hear sniggering, but couldn’t see anybody in the shadows. I have to admit that I was a little unnerved. I asked her—it was a stupid question—what precautions she took to make sure she stayed safe. She said she didn’t dispute the rumor in the neighborhood that she worked for a well-known drug dealer. That way, she said, people assumed she had protection.
I decided to brazen it out and ask about Musa, where he was, whether they were still together, whether they planned to get married. She said, “I’m not marrying anybody.” When I asked her why she felt that way, she said she wanted to be free to die irresponsibly, without notice and for no reason.
—
At home that night I fell asleep thinking of the chasm that separated my life from hers. I still lived in the house I was born in. My parents were asleep in the next room. I could hear the familiar hum of our noisy refrigerator. All the objects—the carpets, the cupboards, the armchairs in the drawing room, the Jamini Roy paintings, the first editions of Tagore’s books in Bengali as well as English, my father’s collection of mountaineering books (it was a hobby, he wasn’t a climber), the family photo albums, the trunks in which our winter clothes were kept, the bed I had slept in since I was a boy—were like sentinels that had watched over me for so many years. True, my adult life lay ahead, but the foundations on which that life would be built seemed so immutable, so unassailable. Tilo, on the other hand, was like a paper boat on a boisterous sea. She was absolutely alone. Even the poor in our country, brutalized as they were, had families. How would she survive? How long would it be before her boat went down?
After I joined the Bureau and left for my training, I lost touch with her.
The next time I saw her was at her wedding.
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