Half a Rupee: Stories by Gulzar Page B

about a month. His name was Wazir Ali. Sometimes we would stay in a house boat, sometimes at the Oberoi Hotel. At the Oberoi, we would always stay in its annexe. There was a sprawling lawn right in front with two chinar trees: tall, stout, leafy—and majestic. They had a regalbearing—they always looked like royalty to me. An emperor and an empress, hands across their chests, surveying the waters of the Dal Lake, lording over it, and we mere mortals would be allowed only the view of the lawns. They both had pride, I tell you—Emperor Jehangir and Empress Noor Jehan …’ Mom was indeed a poet but limited herself only to diaries. I brought her back to what she had started talking about, ‘You were telling me something about Wazir Ali.’
    ‘Oh yes! Every evening he would take you out for a stroll in your pram. And then one day he did not return. Night fell. It was quite late. We began to worry. And then he went out to look for you.’
    ‘He? Who?’
    ‘Your father. Who else? Mr Arun Banerjee. I kept waiting—restless; worrying myself to death. He returned after what seemed like an age to me. In a taxi—you, your pram, your father and he. I mean not Wazira, but another Kashmiri. I asked your father, “Where’s Wazira?” He looked at me in a hurt sort of way. He dropped you in my arms, threw the pram in the veranda and called for the Kashmiri who had come with him. “Moorti Lal!” he shouted and then took out a fifty-rupee note and handed it to him. That Moorti Lal was an incessant talker and he started off, “Sahib, how could you entrust him with such a little kid? Thank God, he headed straight home, what if he had run away with her somewhere else …?” Your father dismissed him with a wave of his hand and the man quietly walked away.’
    ‘Fifty rupees! Is that all I was worth?’ I butted in, just for kicks.
    ‘Fifty rupees was a princely sum in those days!’
    I was still curious about the story, worried where Wazira had taken me.
    ‘He took you to his house, to flaunt you to his grandmother. Wazira was an orphan. His parents had been trapped in a snowy avalanche—they were never found. Not even their dead bodies. Wazira had to stay many a night in the hotel on night duty. And whenever he returned home in the mornings, his grandmother would get after him, she would hurl a thousand angry questions and insults at him. He would try to pacify his grandmother by saying that he had got married and had spent the night with his wife. And that he even had a little daughter with her. And because of his grandmother’s horrible mood swings he was scared to bring her home.’
    I was beginning to like Wazira, albeit just in the quiet of my heart. He had that quaintness, like the heroes in fairytales that grandma told you. His story too seemed like a fairytale to me, then. And it seems like a fairytale even now. I felt that fairytales were born in Kashmir and they trickled downwards to the plains only to avoid the icy Kashmiri winter. Sometimes it occurred to me that had Wazira really ran away with me, I would have grown up in Kashmir. But I did not cherish the idea of separating from my folks in the story.
    ‘Did Wazira ever come back?’ I asked.
    ‘Yes, he did. He begged our forgiveness and apologizedprofusely. We hired him all over again but we never ever again let him take you out for a stroll.’
    I found an album in the house. It was filled with old photographs, but Wazira was not to be found in a single one of them. I found photographs of mine clicked in Gulmarg, Yusmarg, Pahalgam and Chandanwadi—nothing less than illustrations from old books of fairytales.
    It was only when I was reading philosophy in college that I asked Mom, ‘Shall I go visit Kashmir in these holidays?’
    ‘Don’t you see the news on TV? These Kashmiris have wreaked havoc …’
    I was still in college when I saw it on TV—there was some cricket match being played and Kashmiri youths were shouting anti-India slogans. There were