he already knew them—they were imprinted upon his heart—but to imbibe them, savour them, nourish himself upon them. And so when Sarla and Ravi took him to Nizamuddin and beside the saint's tomb they heard a blind beggar play his lute and sing in a voice so soulful that it melted one's very being,
'When I was born
I was my mother's prince.
When I married
I became my wife's king.
But you have reduced me
To being a beggar, Lord,
Come begging for alms
With my hands outstretched—'
it was as if the thirst of Raja's pilgrim soul was being slaked, and never had thirst been slaked by music so sublime as made by this ancient beggar in his rags, a tin can at his knee for alms—and of course he must have whatever was in Raja's purse, every last coin, alas that they were so few. Now if this beggar were performing in the West, the great theatres of every metropolis would throw open their doors to him. He would perform under floodlights, his name would be on posters, in the papers, on everyone's lips. Gold would pile up at his feet—but then, would he be such a singer as he was now, a pilgrim soul content to sit in the shade of the great saint Nizamuddin's little fretted marble tomb, and dedicate his song to him as homage?
Raja, leaving his slippers at the gateway to the courtyard, approached the tomb with such ecstasy etched upon his noble features that Sarla, and Ravi too, found themselves gazing at him rather than about them—Sarla's bare and Ravi's stockinged feet on the stones, braving the dirt and flies and garbage that had first made them shrink and half turn away. Sarla had held her sari to her nose as they passed a row of butchers' shops on their way to the tomb, buffalo's innards had hung like curtains in the small booths, and the air was rife with raw blood and the thrum of flies, and she asked Raja, in the car, 'How is it that you, a vegetarian, a Brahmin, walked in there and never even twitched your
nose
?' He cast his eyes upon her briefly—and they were still those narrow, horizontal pools of darkness she remembered—and sighed, 'My dear, true souls do not turn away from humanity or, if they do, it is only to meditate and pray, then come back, fortified, to embrace it—beggars, thieves, lepers, whoever—their sores, their rags. They do not flinch from them, for they know these are only the covering, the concealing robes of the soul, don't you know?' and Sarla, and Ravi, seated on either side of Raja on the comfortably upholstered back seat of the air-conditioned Ambassador, now speeding past the Lodi Gardens to their own green enclave, wondered if Raja was referring to himself or the sufi.
That afternoon, as they sat on the veranda, sipping tea and nibbling at the biscuits the cook had sent up in a temper (he was supposed to be on leave, he was not going to bake fancy cakes at a time when he was rightfully to have had his summer vacation, and so the sahibs could do with biscuits bought in the bazaar), Raja, a little melancholy, a little subdued—which Sarla and Ravi put down to the impression left on him by their visit to the sufi's tomb—piped up in a beseeching voice, 'Sarla, Ravi, where are those ravishing friends of yours I met when you were at the High Commission in London? The Dutta-Rays, was it not? You must know who I mean—you told me how they'd returned to Delhi and built this absolutely fabulous hacienda in Vasant Vihar. Isn't that quite close by?'
'It is,' Ravi admitted.
Like a persistent child, Raja continued, 'Then
why
don't we have them over? This evening? I remember she sang like a nightingale—those melancholy, funereal songs of Tagore's. Wouldn't they be perfect on an evening like this which simply hangs suspended in time, don't you know, as if the dust and heat were holding it in their
cruel
grasp? Oh, Sarla, do telephone, do send for her—tell her I
pine
to hear the sound of her avian voice. Just for that, I'm even willing to put up with her husband who I remember finding—how shall