In Custody

by

Anita Desai

Abid Siddiqui Character Analysis

Abid Siddiqui is the sole member of Lala Ram Lal College’s Urdu department. He is loosely related to the minor 19th-century Muslim nobleman who funded the department and the construction of Mirpore’s primary mosque, and he lives in a huge, old house that is slowly falling apart, room by room. (Like Nur, Siddiqui’s house represents the fate of Urdu in India.) Siddiqui is genuinely excited about Deven’s research into Nur, and he uses his friendship with the registrar, Mr. Rai, to secure funding for it. But while he is generally sympathetic to Deven’s troubles, he gets increasingly frustrated with Deven the more he shows up begging for help and money. By the end of the book, he all but gives up on helping Deven with the project and sells his house to a wealthy developer from Delhi (which represents India’s old elite choosing capitalism and modernization over tradition).

Abid Siddiqui Quotes in In Custody

The In Custody quotes below are all either spoken by Abid Siddiqui or refer to Abid Siddiqui . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Memory and the Passage of Time Theme Icon
).
Chapter 6 Quotes

Fatefully, it was the head of the Urdu department, Abid Siddiqui who, in keeping with the size and stature of that department, was a small man, whose youthful face was prematurely topped with a plume of white hair as if to signify the doomed nature of his discipline. It was perhaps unusual to find a private college as small as Lala Ram Lal’s offering a language such as Urdu that was nearly extinct, but it happened that Lala Ram Lal’s descendants […] had to accept a very large donation from the descendants of the very nawab who had fled Delhi in the aftermath of the 1857 mutiny and built the mosque. […] It was promised a department in which its language would be kept alive in place of the family name.

Related Characters: Deven Sharma, Murad , Nur , Abid Siddiqui
Page Number: 100-101
Explanation and Analysis:

Seeing that line waver and break up and come together again upon the sheet of blue paper, Deven felt as if he were seeing all the straight lines and cramped alphabet of his small, tight life wavering and dissolving and making way for a wave of freshness, motion, even kinesis. In openness lay possibilities, the top of the wave of experience surging forward from a very great distance, but lifting and closing in and sounding loudly in his ear. What had happened to the hitherto entirely static and stagnant backwaters of his existence? It was not the small scrawled note, not Siddiqui or Rai or anyone to do with the college who had caused this stir; it was Nur, Nur’s poetry and Nur’s person.

Related Characters: Deven Sharma, Nur , Abid Siddiqui , Mr. Rai
Page Number: 109-110
Explanation and Analysis:

What had made Siddiqui do it?

Nur, of course, the magic name of Nur Shahjahanabadi of course, thought Deven, walking out into the brassy light. It was a name that opened doors, changed expressions, caused dust and cobwebs to disappear, visions to appear, bathed in radiance. It had led him on to avenues that would take him to another land, another element.

Related Characters: Deven Sharma, Nur , Abid Siddiqui
Page Number: 111
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

Later Deven could not understand how it all come about—how he, the central character in the whole affair, the protagonist of it (if Murad were to be disregarded), the one on whom depended the entire matter of the interview, the recording and the memoirs, to which Siddiqui was no more than an accessory, having arrived on the scene accidentally and at a later stage, and in which he played a minor role—how he, in the course of that evening, had relinquished his own authority and surrendered it to Siddiqui who now emerged the stronger while he, Deven, had been brought to his knees, abject and babbling in his helplessness. How?

Related Characters: Deven Sharma, Murad , Nur , Safiya, Abid Siddiqui
Related Symbols: Tape Recorder
Page Number: 153-154
Explanation and Analysis:
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Abid Siddiqui Quotes in In Custody

The In Custody quotes below are all either spoken by Abid Siddiqui or refer to Abid Siddiqui . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Memory and the Passage of Time Theme Icon
).
Chapter 6 Quotes

Fatefully, it was the head of the Urdu department, Abid Siddiqui who, in keeping with the size and stature of that department, was a small man, whose youthful face was prematurely topped with a plume of white hair as if to signify the doomed nature of his discipline. It was perhaps unusual to find a private college as small as Lala Ram Lal’s offering a language such as Urdu that was nearly extinct, but it happened that Lala Ram Lal’s descendants […] had to accept a very large donation from the descendants of the very nawab who had fled Delhi in the aftermath of the 1857 mutiny and built the mosque. […] It was promised a department in which its language would be kept alive in place of the family name.

Related Characters: Deven Sharma, Murad , Nur , Abid Siddiqui
Page Number: 100-101
Explanation and Analysis:

Seeing that line waver and break up and come together again upon the sheet of blue paper, Deven felt as if he were seeing all the straight lines and cramped alphabet of his small, tight life wavering and dissolving and making way for a wave of freshness, motion, even kinesis. In openness lay possibilities, the top of the wave of experience surging forward from a very great distance, but lifting and closing in and sounding loudly in his ear. What had happened to the hitherto entirely static and stagnant backwaters of his existence? It was not the small scrawled note, not Siddiqui or Rai or anyone to do with the college who had caused this stir; it was Nur, Nur’s poetry and Nur’s person.

Related Characters: Deven Sharma, Nur , Abid Siddiqui , Mr. Rai
Page Number: 109-110
Explanation and Analysis:

What had made Siddiqui do it?

Nur, of course, the magic name of Nur Shahjahanabadi of course, thought Deven, walking out into the brassy light. It was a name that opened doors, changed expressions, caused dust and cobwebs to disappear, visions to appear, bathed in radiance. It had led him on to avenues that would take him to another land, another element.

Related Characters: Deven Sharma, Nur , Abid Siddiqui
Page Number: 111
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

Later Deven could not understand how it all come about—how he, the central character in the whole affair, the protagonist of it (if Murad were to be disregarded), the one on whom depended the entire matter of the interview, the recording and the memoirs, to which Siddiqui was no more than an accessory, having arrived on the scene accidentally and at a later stage, and in which he played a minor role—how he, in the course of that evening, had relinquished his own authority and surrendered it to Siddiqui who now emerged the stronger while he, Deven, had been brought to his knees, abject and babbling in his helplessness. How?

Related Characters: Deven Sharma, Murad , Nur , Safiya, Abid Siddiqui
Related Symbols: Tape Recorder
Page Number: 153-154
Explanation and Analysis: