ArHi FanFic - The Court of Nawab Malik - Ch03 Posted 18/06 - Page 2

She knows the proposal brings advantages for her family. A connection worth seeking. Will she get to meet the nawab?

She has the opportunity to go see the family first hand. A lot will be revealed.

This is such a nice family. Full of comfort, warmth, and understanding.

Chapter 03 – ROAD TO LUCKNOW

The road from Faizabad to Lucknow took the better part of three days. This was longer than it needed to take because Abbas had made the journey twice before in better time, and the roads in this season were dry and reasonable, and the horses were good.

The first day of the journey from Faizabad was easy, roads were familiar, the city releasing them into the countryside. Khushi had the Mir in one hand and the window in the other, alternating glances between the two depending on which was giving her more at any particular moment.

By midday she had finished two of the Mir’s later sections and eaten most of the food Sakeena had packed, the naan wrapped in cloth that was still faintly warm from the morning’s oven, the murabba in its small clay pot, the nimki that Nargis had been rationing sensibly until Abbas discovered the bag and the rationing became academic.

“You ate the nimki,” Nargis said, not looking up from her letter but her brows furrowed.

“There was plenty,” Abbas said.

“There was enough for three people over three days.”

“There is still enough for three people. The proportion has simply been redistributed toward day one.”

Nargis wrote another sentence. “Khushi, tell your cousin that redistributed is not the same as rationed.”

“Abbas bhai,” Khushi said, without looking up from her book, “redistributed is not the same as rationed.”

“Thank you,” Nargis said, her pen digging into the paper with more force than required.

“I’m quoting you directly,” Khushi said. “I have no opinion on the nimki. I wasn’t paying attention when it was happening.”

“You ate four,” Abbas accused blatantly.

“I was reading.”

“You ate four pieces of nimki while reading without paying attention?”

“It’s a very involving section.”

Abbas narrowed his eyes and promised to take Nargis to a famous shop in Lucknow where they sold the best Nimki and Khushi was not invited, he added.

The carriage moved through the afternoon light.

_____________

The river stop was Abbas’s concession, he had declared the light unremarkable with the authority of a man who had made the journey before, and the ladies looked and the light had been, in fact, extraordinary.

The river caught it at that hour in the late afternoon, the light coming in at an angle that turned the surface to hammered copper and the far bank to something that barely existed, a suggestion of trees and distance dissolving into the glow.

They stood at the road’s edge and looked at it for a while.

Abbas, who was not a man given to excessive appreciation of scenery, stood with his hands folded behind his back, then slowly turned to look at his cousin.

“Khushi.”

“Mm.”

“I want to say something to you, and I would like you to hear all of it before you respond. Not because I expect you to disagree loudly.” The ghost of the morning’s teasing returned briefly to him. “But because it is the kind of thing that is better received whole.”

She turned from the sunset to look at him. “Go on.”

He was quiet for a moment, choosing his words with care.

“You know who you are,” he said. “I have always loved that about you, since always. You say what you think. You ask the questions that are actually in your head rather than the ones that are polite to ask. You have opinions about poetry and food and propriety and you do not pretend not to have them simply because pretending would be expected.” He sighed heavily. “This is who you are, and I would not want anything about you to be different in the end.”

“But,” Khushi prompted gently, watching his thoughts play on his face, and knowing this was more of a polite disclaimer for what he actually wanted to say.

“But,” Abbas agreed. “Not in the end is not the same as not yet.” He turned to face her fully. “I am asking this as your cousin, who loves you, and not as a man delivering instructions on behalf of anyone, is that for the next weeks, while this is still being decided, you choose your words. Not dishonestly or, by pretending to be someone you are not. But just carefully.” He held her gaze. “There is a difference between saying what you think and saying everything you think, in the order it occurs to you, the moment it occurs to you. You have never had to learn that difference, Khushi, because at home, the people around you have always known you well enough to receive the unfiltered version with affection.”

“And here they will not.”

“Here,” he said, “everything you say will be heard by people who do not yet know you, who are forming their first impressions, and who will — fairly or not — connect what you say to the family you come from. Not just to you. To your father. To me. To the trade, to the contract, to every Farooqui who has a stake in how this household thinks of us.” He paused. “There is a difference between directness and saying the first true thing that arrives, before you have decided whether it is the right true thing to say in this room, to this person, at this moment. Do you understand?”

Khushi looked at the sunset. The gold had gone, now the trees were silhouettes, the sky behind them darkening.

“You are saying,” she said slowly, “that I am allowed to be myself, but I am not allowed to be careless about which parts of myself I show, and when.”

“Yes,” Abbas said, relief evident in his tone. “That is exactly what I am saying.”

“And if I say something that gives them reason to think twice. About the proposal.”

“Then it will not only cost you,” Abbas said, gently but without softening it. “It will cost our standing, going forward, regardless of what happens with the proposal itself. It will cost the contract not directly, perhaps, but these things are never as separate as we would like them to be. And it will cost… ” he paused, “It will cost the version of this story where you walked in here, looked at everything clearly, and were given the chance to decide for yourself what you thought. That chance only exists if the door stays open long enough for you to walk all the way through it and look around properly. A door that closes after the first morning because of something said too quickly is a door that never gave you the choosing at all.”

Khushi was quiet for a long moment.

“I had not thought of it that way,” she said. “I had been thinking about, well, about not misrepresenting myself. About being seen accurately.” She looked at him. “I had not thought about the difference between being seen accurately over time, and being seen incompletely in a single afternoon and judged on that.”

“That is the difference,” Abbas said. “And it is not a small one.”

She nodded slowly.

Nargis who had been silent throughout the conversation, cleared her throat and said softly, “I know you have been re-reading the letter, thinking about what from a different page might mean, building a picture in your head of a man and a household before you’ve stood in a single room with either.” She grabbed Khushi’s hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. “That picture might turn out to be accurate. Or, it might not. Either way, the people we’re about to meet will also be doing exactly what you’ve been doing, forming a picture of you, before they’ve really had the chance to look. All of it built on letters, reports and whatever your father’s reputation tells them, fairly or not.”

“And I see that you’re both worried I’ll arrive holding mine too tightly to let theirs, or the actual evidence, in.”

“A little,” Abbas admitted and Nargis nodded. “Not because we think you’re wrong to have hopes. Hope is the right thing to carry into this, honestly. I just don’t want you to mistake the hope for a conclusion.”

Khushi was quiet for a moment, looking at fields where the gold had gone from the trees, the sky behind them settling into a deep enveloping blue.

“That’s fair,” she said, finally.

“Whatever you find whether good, complicated, somewhere in between, let it be what it actually is, rather than what you’d already decided it would be.”

The lamps at the staging post were being lit behind them, one by one, and the night was settling over the road that would soon, bring them the rest of the way to Lucknow, to a household she was yet to meet, but even now, beginning to form its own opinions, sight unseen, the way cities, households and grandmothers, apparently did.

_____________

The third day brought the wheel trouble in the morning, a painfully slow process, managed with saint like patience by the driver and impatience by Abbas, who had opinions about wheel maintenance that he communicated to the driver in detail while the driver communicated back that the additional commentary was not helping the process.

Khushi sat on a flat stone by the roadside, then bent down to pluck some wildflowers.

Nargis sat beside her and wrote.

“Do you ever stop?” Khushi asked, her hands weaving the stems together.

“Stop what?”

“Writing. To your mother.”

“She likes to know things,” Nargis said.

“You have been writing since Faizabad.” Surely, Khushi thought to herself, there wasn’t much that happen, if anything at all.

“There have been things to report since Faizabad.” Nargis turned a page. “The nimki incident alone required two paragraphs.”

Khushi blinked at her. “You wrote to your mother about the nimki?”

Nargis did not look up or replied right away, she finished her sentence first with unhurried thoroughness then set down her pen.

“My mother,” she began, “married into a family that did not let her write to her own mother enough. She has told me this many times as a fact about her life. Her mother died before my mother could go home and see her one more time, and in the months after, my mother found all the things she had not said and had assumed there would be time to say.” She paused. “She made me promise, when I married Abbas and left Agra, that I would write everything. Not just the important things. Everything. Because she said you never know, in advance, which of the small things will turn out to have been the important ones.”

Khushi was quiet.

“So I write about the nimki,” Nargis said, with the faint smile that meant she was aware of how this sounded and did not mind. “Because in twenty years I might not remember which afternoon it was that we stopped to look at the light on the water, but if I write it down today, she will have it, and so will I.”

“That is — ” Khushi paused. “That is a very good reason.”

“It is the only reason that has ever mattered to me,” Nargis said simply.

_____________

At last, they arrived at Lucknow.

The road became busier first, then the villages clustered together, then the quality of the air itself changed into a denser, more inhabited combination of the Gomti river and the centuries of cooking fires and the itr that the city exhaled through every door and window and passing sleeve.

Khushi put down her book to watch the minarets, the gardens and then the city itself, a lane, then another, the chowk with its impossible density, the azan from a minaret close by threading through the air alongside the sound of temple bells from somewhere across the river.

Her hand, she noticed, was pressed flat against the carriage window glass until the carriage passed through a massive gate.

The Malik haveli revealed itself in stages.

She had been told it was large. She had understood, from a vague memory, her father’s account, Abbas’s description, the general knowledge of anyone who paid attention to the Nawabi households of Awadh that large was a relative term in Lucknow, where grandeur was the baseline and the question was only of degree. She had calibrated her expectations accordingly.

Perhaps, she had not calibrated them enough.

The outer gate was the first stage with sandstone, carved, the vines running up each pillar ending at the top in a peacock with its tail half-raised. Old carvings, worn at the edges with the smoothness of stone that had been touched by weather and hands for generations, but still each feather individually rendered, the eye of each feather a small inlaid stone catching the late afternoon light in brief dark-green flashes.

She looked at the peacocks as the carriage passed beneath them.

Through the outer gate, a courtyard. Through the courtyard, an inner arch. Through the arch, a second courtyard larger than the first, with the rose bushes along its eastern wall past their full bloom but still carrying the last of their hue.

The fountainless basin at the courtyard’s far end, she could barely see it except that it was made of pale stone, and was dry and empty.

Abbas stepped out first and greeted the men waiting for them. Then turned and offered his hand to Nargis.

Khushi stepped out last.

She stood in the second courtyard and looked up at the haveli, at the arched windows, at the height of it, at the quality of the stone that had absorbed, over generations, the lives of the people inside it, so thoroughly that the original and the acquired could no longer be separated.

It was intimidating.

She had not expected to feel so intimidated. She had expected to feel curious, which was her characteristic response to most new things, and she was curious, but the curiosity was sitting inside something larger and less managed. The haveli was not simply large. It was dense with time, with consequence, with the weight of a family that had been significant in this city for long enough that the city had absorbed them in permanence.

She stood in the courtyard and felt, for the first time since Faizabad, the full size of what she was walking into.

Then she picked up her bag, straightened her dupatta, and walked toward the inner entrance where the woman who managed this household was already waiting to receive the ladies.

Abbas is a smart man. His advice to Khushi in spot on. One can always deliver the words in a right way or wrong way.

Nargis will have a lot of written account of her life to look back to when she is old. She is capturing memories.