Belonging by Umi Sinha Page B

off. He said Father wouldn’t like me disturbing her. I said she hadn’t complained but he said he would tell Father if I didn’t come away at once. Everyone seems to be cross since she came.
    This morning, after Mr. Mukherjee had gone, I went out with my Urdu poetry book and began to practise the poem I am supposed to learn by heart, marching round the compound. Mr. Mukherjee told me that walking helps when you are trying to learn poetry because you can stamp out the rhythm. I don’t really understand the poem, which makes it hard to remember. I kept forgetting the last two lines, and then a voice said them for me. It was a beautiful voice, like honey, and I turned round but she was behind the curtain.‘Why don’t you come out?’ I said, and she opened the curtain and looked at me.
    She is quite old, older even than Aunt Mina, and tall, with a pock-marked face and a long silver plait that reaches almost to her knees. She smiled at me and I smiled back. She asked me if I understood the poem and I said no and she said it was about the pain of love and I was too young to understand it. And then she asked me some questions and I told her about Mr. Mukherjee and my lessons and she said I sounded very clever, like my Father. I don’t know why no one likes her because I think she’s nice.
14th May 1869
    The bibi and I are friends now. Every day after lessons I read my poetry or my Urdu homework to her and sometimes she helps me with it and sometimes she plays her dilruba and sings. Mir is her favourite poet and her favourite song is this one. I wrote it down and Mr. Mukherjee translated it into English for me.
    My friendless heart’s a city reduced to ruin,
    The great world has shrunk to a patch of rubble.
    In this place, where love was martyred,
    What now survives but memories and regret?
    I asked her why her songs are always so sad. She says ghazals are like that. The loved one is always unobtainable, the lover has no hope, the mistress is cruel – her eyebrows are as sharp as daggers; her eyes shoot arrows. Mr. Mukherjee says in England in the Middle Ages they had ‘courtly love’ and the lover was always tested, sometimes to death, to provehis love, a bit like in Ivanhoe . It seems silly to me. She told me she used to be a singer and perform at mushairas. They are competitions where each singer takes it in turns to sing a couplet, and at the end of the night the one whose couplets are the cleverest is the winner. I asked if she ever won and she said she did. Then she told me that was how she met Father. He used to come and listen to her sing. Then she said, ‘That was a long time ago, when we were both young.’ She sounded sad. I wanted to ask more but I didn’t like to. I wonder if Father knew her before he knew Mother.
    She lent me the book and that night Father picked it up off my bedside table and looked at the poem, which I had marked with a slip of paper. I thought he would ask me about it but he seemed to think Mr. Mukherjee had given it to me. When I asked him about the poem he told me it was written after parts of Delhi were razed to the ground and some of Mir’s relatives were killed. I asked him who did that and why. He sighed and said, ‘I wish I could answer that, Henry.’

Cecily
28th May 1856
    Dear Mina,
    We are back from the hills early because there has been some trouble with the sepoys. Arthur says it is nothing to worry about, but he insisted upon returning at once although he is still quite weak. He wished me to remain there until it gets cooler but I could not let him travel alone, although I have hardly seen him since we returned as he spends even more of his time at the Lines.
    You cannot begin to imagine the heat, Mina! The sun blazes down from a white sky that hurts one’s eyes and the only time one can go out is in the very early morning. Except for my rides then, I am confined to the house. The dust is dreadful and almost chokes one, and the tattie blinds have to be soaked each