CHAPTER 01 - THE DECREE
The durbar had been assembled since dawn, and it was now past nine, and Arnav Malik had not yet sat down.
He stood at the arched window of the upper corridor instead, looking down at the courtyard where the viziers arranged in their careful hierarchy, the clerks with their scrolls, the petitioners who had traveled from God knew where and would wait God knew how long. They fanned themselves and murmured. One man had brought a goat, for reasons Arnav had decided not to investigate.
Below, in the far corner of the courtyard, the peacock was eating something it had found near the fountain drain.
Arnav watched it.
“They’ve been waiting forty minutes,” Aman Mirza whispered from behind him.
“I know.”
“Raza Sahib has rearranged his shawl four times.”
“I know that too.”
Aman came to stand beside him. A broad, unhurried man who had known Arnav since they were boys learning swordsmanship in this same courtyard, who will only say something when it becomes necessary.
“There’s a goat,” he begin, scratching his beard.
“Don’t.”
“I was only going to say — “
“Aman.”
Aman was quiet for a few seconds. “Your grandmother sent word again this morning.”
The peacock had finished whatever it was eating and was now walking with great dignity toward the center of the courtyard, where its presence would cause the most disruption to the assembled proceedings. Arnav watched its progress with something adjacent to envy.
“I know what her word says.”
“She’s asked that you receive her before the durbar.” When the Nawab in question remained silent, he started again. “Well, she’s asked that you receive her instead of the durbar.”
Arnav finally turned away from the window. In the corridor’s filtered morning light he looked exactly what he was, a gentleman of twenty-eight who had been a nawab for six years and had learned to wear the thing like armor, the formal white sherwani buttoned to the throat, the bearing that gave nothing away, the particular quality of attention in his eyes that made people feel he was seeing slightly past them, toward something they could not turn around fast enough to catch. “Tell her I’ll come after.”
“And when she asks why you’ve not yet agreed to the proposal?”
He straightened a cuff. “Tell her I was busy watching a goat.”
_________
Daadi Begum’s quarters were the oldest in the Malik haveli. The rooms that had been her husband’s father’s rooms before they were hers, the ceilings high enough to hold their own weather, the walls hung with kinkhab panels that had gone slightly dim with age but refused, on principle, to look shabby. She sat on a low takht near the window when Arnav entered, her paan box open beside her, her spine as straight as it had been at forty. She was seventy-one years old. She had outlasted a nawab, a famine, three attempted political coups, and every person who had ever told her to rest.
She looked at him in the same way as she always looked at him, as though she had completed an assessment and was now simply waiting for him to arrive at the same conclusion.
“Sit,” she gestured towards the chair.
He sat. The chair he chose was slightly farther than she would have preferred. She noted this and said nothing.
“Good morning, Daadi.”
“I invited you today to discuss the Farooqui proposal,” She began pleasantly.
He accepted tea from the attendant who materialized silently and just as silently vanished. The tea was too sweet, she had always taken her tea too sweet, and she ordered it for visitors the same, as a reminder of who set the terms.
“Have you reviewed the family?” she asked when he drank the tea without a word.
“I’ve reviewed the family.”
“The girl is educated. Cultured.” She nodded. “Her father is a man of standing, if modest means. The match is not — “
“Daadi.”
“— unworthy of the name Malik, as some have whispered. I want that said plainly.”
“I wasn’t thinking of the name Malik.”
She looked at him. “Then what were you thinking of?”
The room held its breath. Outside, somewhere in the women’s quarters, a dove was cooing in irregular bursts, three notes, pause, three notes, as though trying to remember a song.
“I was thinking,” Arnav said, setting down the tea, “that a woman brought into this house deserves to know what she is walking into. Before I agree to anything.”
Daadi Begum was quiet for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was precisely measured, the way her paan was being made, each element calculated, nothing left to chance. “Every house has its history.”
“Our history is not every house’s history.”
She set down her paan box. This was, for Daadi Begum, the equivalent of another person standing up and raising their voice.
“You are the Nawab of Lucknow. Not a poet mourning in a garden. Not a son still standing in his father’s shadow, which I do not dismiss but you are also neither of those things when you sit in that chair and that court looks to you.” She folded her hands in her lap. “A nawab without an heir — “
He looked at her steadily.
She met his gaze and shifted, barely, the adjustment of a woman who has chosen her ground carefully and is choosing her words with equal care. “Even the greatest haveli,” she said quietly, “becomes a ruin the moment it stops being lived in. Stone by stone, it is not the weather that takes it.” She shot him a look. “You have been silent long enough, Arnav. The walls are beginning to listen to other voices.”
He did not stiffen, accustomed to criticism of all kind. “Our legacy will not be erased.”
“Fill the house,” she sighed, “Before someone else decides what it should echo with.”
The silence followed. The kinkhab panels breathed slowly in the draft from the window, their gold threads catching the morning light and releasing it.
“Raza Sahib has a nephew. A young man with pleasant face and absolutely no spine. But a Malik without a successor is an invitation, and Raza Sahib is a man who accepts every invitation he is given.”
“He is nothing more than a nuisance.” Arnav turned the teacup slightly on its saucer, one quarter turn, no more. Daadi Begum watched the movement and recognized it. His father had done the same thing, in this same room, when he was trying not to give ground.
Daadi Begum softened. Barely. Just enough.
“The future does not have to be written the way the past was,” she said, more quietly. “I am asking you to do it differently. That requires — ” she paused — “a different beginning. A woman beside you who is not…” Her words abruptly cut off, the unsaid name of Arnav’s mother moving like a draft under a door. “…what your mother was left to become.”
Outside, the dove had stopped. A peacock called from somewhere beyond the garden wall, a long, colonial, mournful and magnificent sound.
Arnav looked at his grandmother. She had not looked away. She never looked away, it was her one form of mercy, that she made you feel she could bear to see you clearly, even when you could not bear it yourself.
“You said you’d made inquiries,” he said at last. His voice had changed, not softened, exactly, but the register had shifted. He was listening now rather than deflecting. “About the girl.”
Daadi Begum recognized the shift and did not remark on it.
“I did.” She reached for her paan box again, opened it, and began assembling her paan with the focused attention. “Her name is Khushi. Her father, Shafiq Farooqui, is a learned man. He raised her with… a certain freedom of thought. Perhaps more than was wise.” A leaf was folded, a precise triangle. “She reads. Persian, among other languages. She argues with tutors. One apparently resigned.”
The faintest curve of her mouth, gone before it fully arrived.
“She refused a match two years ago,” Daadi Begum continued. “A landlord’s son who was wealthy, dull, the kind of man who would have spent the rest of her life reminding her she should be grateful. She told her father the man had the eyes of someone who had never once been surprised by anything and that she could not spend her life with a person like that.” She placed the folded paan delicately in her cheek. “Her father agreed with her assessment and declined the proposal. Which tells you something about both of them.”
Arnav was quiet. The dove had resumed its three-note loop outside. The morning held itself still as though the city itself had paused to listen.
“She sounds difficult.” he finally said.
“She sounds alive,” Daadi Begum countered. “Which is what I am choosing, for this house. Deliberately.” She looked at him squarely. “I watched what a quiet woman became in these walls, Arnav. I will not do it again.”
There was nothing to answer, so he did not try.
“There is one more thing,” she said, in a tone that meant she had saved it intentionally, for when the listener has run out of arguments. “I am told she dances.”
He looked up with a hint of curiosity in his gaze, probably against his will.
“Classical,” Daadi Begum continued, without inflection. “She was trained, informally, by a woman in Faizabad. A legitimate guru, not — ” a gesture that closed off an entire category of misunderstanding — “she learned in private, because it was not permitted openly for a girl of her standing. She has never performed.” A pause. “Her father permits it, within the house.”
Arnav said nothing. His expression had not changed. This was, Daadi Begum knew, not the same thing as nothing changing.
“It will need to be handled preemptively.” She picked up her leather bound dairy and noted down something. “Such things, in the nawab’s household, well, there are appearances to consider. The court has opinions.”
“The court always has opinions.”
“Yes,” she nodded. “And you are the nawab. Which means you decide which of those opinions matter.” She looked at him steadily. “That is, in fact, the only freedom the chair gives you. I’d suggest using it.”
“The name Shafiq Farooqui is not unfamiliar.”
Daadi Begum’s hands stilled briefly.
“You know about the business arrangement,” he said. It was not a question.
“I know.”
“He kept the letters,” Arnav placed the tea on the table. “My father’s vakeel told me, after the estate was settled. Shafiq Farooqui wrote three times and received no reply.” He paused. “I wish to know, if we were to approach this family, whether the silence will stand between us.”
Daadi Begum regarded her grandson carefully. She has been surprised and was not going to show it. Surprised not by the information, she had known the history, but by the fact that he had found it. That he had looked.
“You have been doing your own inquiries,” she said.
“You told me to use the freedom the chair gives me.”
A pause that was almost, almost, a smile.
He stood. Smoothed his sherwani.
“Tell them the Malik house will consider the proposal,” he said.
“That’s all?”
He walked to the door. “That’s all.”
“Arnav.”
He stopped, but not turn fully, just enough to show her he was listening.
“Your father,” she whispered, “also stood at that door once. He also took his time.”
He stood there for a moment. The sound of the durbar below was audible even here, patient, waiting, the court that had been assembled since dawn.
“I know.”
The two words carrying the weight of thirteen years, the boy who had sat in the small chair and not made a sound, the man who had spent six years being deliberately, consciously, exhaustingly something other than what the small chair’s occupant had become.
He left.
_________
The peacock, by the time he returned to the durbar, had positioned itself directly beside the petitioner with the goat. The goat appeared unbothered. The peacock appeared to be reconsidering its life choices.
Arnav sat down, finally, in the nawab’s chair.
“Begin.”
And so the durbar began. Raza Sahib, in his position to the left of the central platform, had rearranged his shawl a fifth time and was watching the nawab. Shamsher Khan, his nephew, sat at the room’s far edge, was watching Raza Sahib. Aman, at Arnav’s right, was watching all of them with the patient comprehensive attention of a man who has learned to read a room the way other men read documents, thoroughly, between the lines, for what is not said.
The petition from the eastern district water rights was heard and resolved. The weavers’ petition for the chikankari craftsmen, the zardozi guild, the cheaper imported cloth undercutting their established work was received and noted. Arnav listened with heavy focus of a man who is listening to the words and also to the several other conversations happening beneath them.
Raza Sahib spoke on the trade matter. The market’s own wisdom, the buyer’s freedom, the practical accommodation of commercial reality. The language of a man who had positions already established, alliances already formed, interests already identified in the outcome.
“I will review the import duties on external cloth,” Arnav said, when Raza Sahib had finished. “Prepare the relevant documents.” He looked at Raza Sahib. “Before the end of the week.”
Raza Sahib inclined his head. “As you say, Nawab sahib.”
Arnav returned to the next petition.
The matter was not settled. He knew it and Raza Sahib knew it and the court, which had been reading these two men across from each other for six years, knew it with certainty. The court understood that the slow games are the ones that matter.
But the session continued. The court performed its function. Lucknow conducted its business.
Daadi Begum, receiving the news of the durbar’s conclusion from Mariam Bibi that evening, permitted herself a brief, private expression, of a woman whose planning had arrived at its first intended station. Someone with a limited vocabulary might call it a smile.
_________
Edited by mistlefoe - 15 hours ago
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Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi 2
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