Nur Character Analysis

Why should a visit from Murad upset him so much? There was no obvious reason of course—they had known each other since they were at school together: Murad had been the spoilt rich boy with money in his pocket for cinema shows and cigarettes and Deven the poor widow’s son who could be bribed and bought to do anything for him, and although this had been the basis of their friendship, it had grown and altered and stood the test of time. But Deven did not like him appearing without warning during college hours and disturbing him just when he needed to concentrate; it was very upsetting.

“Now I am planning a special issue on Urdu poetry. Someone has to keep alive the glorious tradition of Urdu literature. If we do not do it, at whatever cost, how will it survive in this era of—that vegetarian monster, Hindi?” He pronounced the last word with such disgust that it made Deven shrink back and shrivel in his chair, for Hindi was what he taught at the college and for which he was therefore responsible to some degree. “That language of peasants,” Murad sneered, picking his teeth with a matchstick. “The language that is raised on radishes and potatoes,” he laughed rudely, pushing aside the empty plates on the table. “Yet, like these vegetables, it flourishes, while Urdu—language of the court in days of royalty—now languishes in the back lanes and gutters of the city.”

The bus soon left Mirpore behind. It came as a slight shock to Deven that one could so easily and quickly free oneself from what had come to seem to him not only the entire world since he had no existence outside it, but often a cruel trap, or prison, as well, an indestructible prison from which there was no escape.

Life is no more than a funeral procession winding towards the grave,
Its small joys the flowers of funeral wreaths …

If it had not been for the colour and the noise, Chandni Chowk might have been a bazaar encountered in a nightmare; it was so like a maze from which he could find no exit, in which he wandered between the peeling, stained walls of office buildings, the overflowing counters of shops and stalls, wondering if the urchin sent to lead him through it was not actually a malevolent imp leading him to his irrevocable disappearance in the reeking heart of the bazaar. The heat and the crowds pressed down from above and all sides, solid and suffocating as sleep.

Before he could make out who had opened the door and now stood behind it, he heard an immense voice, cracked and hoarse and thorny, boom from somewhere high above their heads: “Who is it that disturbs the sleep of the aged at this hour of the afternoon that is given to rest? It can only be a great fool. Fool, are you a fool?”

And Deven, feeling some taut membrane of reservation tear apart inside him and a surging expansion of joy at hearing the voice and the words that could only belong to that superior being, the poet, sang back, “Sir, I am! I am!”

In the midst of all the shadows, the poet’s figure was in startling contrast, being entirely dressed in white. His white beard was splayed across his chest and his long white fingers clasped across it. He did not move and appeared to be a marble form. His body had the density, the compactness of stone. It was large and heavy not on account of obesity or weight, but on account of age and experience. The emptying out and wasting of age had not yet begun its process. He was still at a moment of completion, quite whole.

“Urdu poetry?” he finally sighed, turning a little to one side, towards Deven although not actually addressing himself to a person, merely to a direction, it seemed. “How can there be Urdu poetry where there is no Urdu language left? It is dead, finished. The defeat of the Moghuls by the British threw a noose over its head, and the defeat of the British by the Hindiwallahs tightened it. So now you see its corpse lying here, waiting to be buried.” He tapped his chest with one finger.

It was clear to Deven that these louts, these lafangas of the bazaar world—shopkeepers, clerks, bookies and unemployed parasites—lived out the fantasy of being poets, artists and bohemians here on Nur’s terrace, in Nur’s company. […] This did not surprise Deven; it was exactly the kind of circle he had been familiar with as a student, but what was astonishing was that the great poet Nur should be in the centre of it, like a serene white tika on the forehead of a madman. It was not where Deven had expected to find him. He had pictured him living either surrounded by elderly, sage and dignified litterateurs or else entirely alone, in divine isolation. What were these clowns and jokers and jugglers doing around him, or he with them?

“It is not a matter of Pakistan and Hindustan, of Hindi and Urdu. It is not even a matter of history. It is time you should be speaking of but cannot—the concept of time is too vast for you, I can see that, and yet it is all we really know about in our hearts.”

That, [Deven] saw, was the glory of poets—that they could distance events and emotions, place them where perspective made it possible to view things clearly and calmly. He realized that he loved poetry not because it made things immediate but because it removed them to a position where they became bearable. That was what Nur’s verse did—placed frightening and inexplicable experiences like time and death at a point where they could be seen and studied, in safety.

Deven never quite believed what happened next. He was so confused and shattered by it that he did not know what it was that shattered him, just as the victim of an accident sees and hears the pane of glass smash or sheet of metal buckle but cannot tell what did it—rock, bullet or vehicle. The truth was that he did not really want ever to think back to that scene. If his mind wandered inadvertently towards it, it immediately sensed disaster and veered away into safer regions.

“He was a poet, a scholar—but is he now? Look at him!” She pointed dramatically at Nur who was huddled, whimpering, on the mattress, holding his knees to his chest and rocking from side to side in agony. “Do you call that a poet, or even a man? All of you—you followers of his—you have reduced him to that, making him eat and drink like some animal, like a pig, laughing at your jokes, singing your crude songs, when he should be at work, or resting to prepare himself for work—”

The flock of parrots wheeled around, perhaps on finding the fields bare of grain, and returned to the tree above their heads, screaming and quarrelling as they settled amongst the thorns. One brilliant feather of spring green fluttered down through the air and fell at their feet in the grey clay. Deven bent to pick it up and presented it to his son who stuck it behind his ear in imitation of his schoolteacher with the pencil. “Look, now I’m masterji,” he screamed excitedly.

Yes, that was the climax of that brief halcyon passage. It was as if the evening star shone through at that moment, casting a small pale illumination upon Deven’s flattened grey world.

Who was she? Why should her birthday be celebrated in this manner? How could she claim monopoly of the stage with her raucous singing that now afflicted their ears, her stagey recitation of melodramatic and third-rate verse when the true poet, the great poet, sat huddled and silent, ignored and uncelebrated, Deven asked himself, determinedly not listening with more than a fraction of his attention. She was not worth listening to, he would not listen to her, he had not come to listen to her, he grumbled to himself, and scowled at the spectators who were bobbing their heads, swaying from side to side, beating time with their hands on their knees, giving forth loud exclamations of wonder and appreciation—like puppets, he thought, or trained monkeys.

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.

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.

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.

“Before Time crushes us into dust we must record our struggle against it. We must engrave our name in the sand before the wave comes to sweep it away and make it a part of the ocean.”

“You do not deceive me even if you have thrown dust in his poor weak eyes. I have made my inquiries—I have found out about you, I know your kind—jackals from the so-called universities that are really asylums for failures, trained to feed upon our carcasses. Now you have grown impatient, you can’t even wait till we die—you come to tear at our living flesh—”

O will you come along with us
Or stay back in the pa-ast?
O will you come along …

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?

Frantic to make [Nur] resume his monologue now that the tape was expensively whirling, Deven once forgot himself so far as to lean forward and murmur with the earnestness of an interviewer, “And, sir, were you writing any poetry at the time? Do you have any verse belonging to that period?”

The effect was disastrous. Nur, in the act of reaching out for a drink, froze. “Poetry?” he shot at Deven, harshly. “Poetry of the period? Do you think a poet can be ground between stones, and bled, in order to produce poetry—for you?”

[Nur] broke into a verse that Deven had never heard before, that no one in the room had heard before, that entered into their midst like some visitor from another element, silencing them all with wonder. […] Seizing the book from [Deven], [Nur] wrote in it himself, holding it on his knee, stopping to lick the pencil now and then, peering at the letters with his cataract-filled eyes, while around him the babble broke out again as his audience excitedly discussed this new verse of his. […] This was the audience Nur had always had to try his verses on, Deven saw, revolted by their flattery, and he knelt behind Nur in reverential silence, watching him write, keeping himself apart from the others, the one true disciple in whose safe custody Nur could place his work.

Deven put up both his hands and pushed him back as far as he could on the small landing, till his back was against the wall. “I can’t do that,” he hissed, “it is the property of the college.”

[…]

Deven went down the wooden staircase as steadily as he could although his knees shook weakly. Murad’s perfidy filled him with the iron of resistance and he felt steady, straight. As he reached the foot of the stairs, he heard Murad call over the banisters, “One last time I am offering to help—one last time. Sole rights! Only sole rights!”

Deven went towards the exit without looking back.

Deven recalled, incongruously enough, the conversation in the canteen with Jayadev, how they had envied their scientist colleagues who had at their command the discipline of mathematics, of geometry, in which every question had its answer and every problem its solution. If art, if poetry, could be made to submit their answers, not merely to contain them within perfect, unblemished shapes but to release them and make them available, then—he thought, then—

But then the bubble would be breached and burst, and it would no longer be perfect. And if it were not perfect, and constant, then it would all have been for nothing, it would be nothing.

Deven did not have the courage. He did not have the time. He did not have the will or the wherewithal to deal with this new presence, one he had been happy to ignore earlier and relegate to the grotesque world of hysterics, termagants, viragos, the demented and the outcast. It was not for the timid and circumspect to enter that world on a mission of mercy or rescue. If he were to venture into it, what he learnt would destroy him as a moment of lucidity can destroy the merciful delusions of a madman. He could not allow that.

He tried to return to his old idolatry of the poet, his awe of him, his devotion when it had still been pure, and his gratitude for his poetry and friendship, that strange, unexpected, unimaginable friendship that had brought him so much pain.

That friendship still existed, even if there had been a muddle, a misunderstanding. He had imagined he was taking Nur’s poetry into safe custody, and not realized that if he was to be custodian of Nur’s genius, then Nur would become his custodian and place him in custody too. This alliance could be considered an unendurable burden—or else a shining honour. Both demanded an equal strength.

He had accepted the gift of Nur’s poetry and that meant he was custodian of Nur’s very soul and spirit. It was a great distinction. He could not deny or abandon that under any pressure.

He turned back. He walked up the path. Soon the sun would be up and blazing. The day would begin, with its calamities. They would flash out of the sky and cut him down like swords. He would run to meet them. He ran, stopping only to pull a branch of thorns from under his foot.

Why should a visit from Murad upset him so much? There was no obvious reason of course—they had known each other since they were at school together: Murad had been the spoilt rich boy with money in his pocket for cinema shows and cigarettes and Deven the poor widow’s son who could be bribed and bought to do anything for him, and although this had been the basis of their friendship, it had grown and altered and stood the test of time. But Deven did not like him appearing without warning during college hours and disturbing him just when he needed to concentrate; it was very upsetting.

“Now I am planning a special issue on Urdu poetry. Someone has to keep alive the glorious tradition of Urdu literature. If we do not do it, at whatever cost, how will it survive in this era of—that vegetarian monster, Hindi?” He pronounced the last word with such disgust that it made Deven shrink back and shrivel in his chair, for Hindi was what he taught at the college and for which he was therefore responsible to some degree. “That language of peasants,” Murad sneered, picking his teeth with a matchstick. “The language that is raised on radishes and potatoes,” he laughed rudely, pushing aside the empty plates on the table. “Yet, like these vegetables, it flourishes, while Urdu—language of the court in days of royalty—now languishes in the back lanes and gutters of the city.”

The bus soon left Mirpore behind. It came as a slight shock to Deven that one could so easily and quickly free oneself from what had come to seem to him not only the entire world since he had no existence outside it, but often a cruel trap, or prison, as well, an indestructible prison from which there was no escape.

Life is no more than a funeral procession winding towards the grave,
Its small joys the flowers of funeral wreaths …

If it had not been for the colour and the noise, Chandni Chowk might have been a bazaar encountered in a nightmare; it was so like a maze from which he could find no exit, in which he wandered between the peeling, stained walls of office buildings, the overflowing counters of shops and stalls, wondering if the urchin sent to lead him through it was not actually a malevolent imp leading him to his irrevocable disappearance in the reeking heart of the bazaar. The heat and the crowds pressed down from above and all sides, solid and suffocating as sleep.

Before he could make out who had opened the door and now stood behind it, he heard an immense voice, cracked and hoarse and thorny, boom from somewhere high above their heads: “Who is it that disturbs the sleep of the aged at this hour of the afternoon that is given to rest? It can only be a great fool. Fool, are you a fool?”

And Deven, feeling some taut membrane of reservation tear apart inside him and a surging expansion of joy at hearing the voice and the words that could only belong to that superior being, the poet, sang back, “Sir, I am! I am!”

In the midst of all the shadows, the poet’s figure was in startling contrast, being entirely dressed in white. His white beard was splayed across his chest and his long white fingers clasped across it. He did not move and appeared to be a marble form. His body had the density, the compactness of stone. It was large and heavy not on account of obesity or weight, but on account of age and experience. The emptying out and wasting of age had not yet begun its process. He was still at a moment of completion, quite whole.

“Urdu poetry?” he finally sighed, turning a little to one side, towards Deven although not actually addressing himself to a person, merely to a direction, it seemed. “How can there be Urdu poetry where there is no Urdu language left? It is dead, finished. The defeat of the Moghuls by the British threw a noose over its head, and the defeat of the British by the Hindiwallahs tightened it. So now you see its corpse lying here, waiting to be buried.” He tapped his chest with one finger.

It was clear to Deven that these louts, these lafangas of the bazaar world—shopkeepers, clerks, bookies and unemployed parasites—lived out the fantasy of being poets, artists and bohemians here on Nur’s terrace, in Nur’s company. […] This did not surprise Deven; it was exactly the kind of circle he had been familiar with as a student, but what was astonishing was that the great poet Nur should be in the centre of it, like a serene white tika on the forehead of a madman. It was not where Deven had expected to find him. He had pictured him living either surrounded by elderly, sage and dignified litterateurs or else entirely alone, in divine isolation. What were these clowns and jokers and jugglers doing around him, or he with them?

“It is not a matter of Pakistan and Hindustan, of Hindi and Urdu. It is not even a matter of history. It is time you should be speaking of but cannot—the concept of time is too vast for you, I can see that, and yet it is all we really know about in our hearts.”

That, [Deven] saw, was the glory of poets—that they could distance events and emotions, place them where perspective made it possible to view things clearly and calmly. He realized that he loved poetry not because it made things immediate but because it removed them to a position where they became bearable. That was what Nur’s verse did—placed frightening and inexplicable experiences like time and death at a point where they could be seen and studied, in safety.

Deven never quite believed what happened next. He was so confused and shattered by it that he did not know what it was that shattered him, just as the victim of an accident sees and hears the pane of glass smash or sheet of metal buckle but cannot tell what did it—rock, bullet or vehicle. The truth was that he did not really want ever to think back to that scene. If his mind wandered inadvertently towards it, it immediately sensed disaster and veered away into safer regions.

“He was a poet, a scholar—but is he now? Look at him!” She pointed dramatically at Nur who was huddled, whimpering, on the mattress, holding his knees to his chest and rocking from side to side in agony. “Do you call that a poet, or even a man? All of you—you followers of his—you have reduced him to that, making him eat and drink like some animal, like a pig, laughing at your jokes, singing your crude songs, when he should be at work, or resting to prepare himself for work—”

The flock of parrots wheeled around, perhaps on finding the fields bare of grain, and returned to the tree above their heads, screaming and quarrelling as they settled amongst the thorns. One brilliant feather of spring green fluttered down through the air and fell at their feet in the grey clay. Deven bent to pick it up and presented it to his son who stuck it behind his ear in imitation of his schoolteacher with the pencil. “Look, now I’m masterji,” he screamed excitedly.

Yes, that was the climax of that brief halcyon passage. It was as if the evening star shone through at that moment, casting a small pale illumination upon Deven’s flattened grey world.

Who was she? Why should her birthday be celebrated in this manner? How could she claim monopoly of the stage with her raucous singing that now afflicted their ears, her stagey recitation of melodramatic and third-rate verse when the true poet, the great poet, sat huddled and silent, ignored and uncelebrated, Deven asked himself, determinedly not listening with more than a fraction of his attention. She was not worth listening to, he would not listen to her, he had not come to listen to her, he grumbled to himself, and scowled at the spectators who were bobbing their heads, swaying from side to side, beating time with their hands on their knees, giving forth loud exclamations of wonder and appreciation—like puppets, he thought, or trained monkeys.

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.

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.

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.

“Before Time crushes us into dust we must record our struggle against it. We must engrave our name in the sand before the wave comes to sweep it away and make it a part of the ocean.”

“You do not deceive me even if you have thrown dust in his poor weak eyes. I have made my inquiries—I have found out about you, I know your kind—jackals from the so-called universities that are really asylums for failures, trained to feed upon our carcasses. Now you have grown impatient, you can’t even wait till we die—you come to tear at our living flesh—”

O will you come along with us
Or stay back in the pa-ast?
O will you come along …

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?

Frantic to make [Nur] resume his monologue now that the tape was expensively whirling, Deven once forgot himself so far as to lean forward and murmur with the earnestness of an interviewer, “And, sir, were you writing any poetry at the time? Do you have any verse belonging to that period?”

The effect was disastrous. Nur, in the act of reaching out for a drink, froze. “Poetry?” he shot at Deven, harshly. “Poetry of the period? Do you think a poet can be ground between stones, and bled, in order to produce poetry—for you?”

[Nur] broke into a verse that Deven had never heard before, that no one in the room had heard before, that entered into their midst like some visitor from another element, silencing them all with wonder. […] Seizing the book from [Deven], [Nur] wrote in it himself, holding it on his knee, stopping to lick the pencil now and then, peering at the letters with his cataract-filled eyes, while around him the babble broke out again as his audience excitedly discussed this new verse of his. […] This was the audience Nur had always had to try his verses on, Deven saw, revolted by their flattery, and he knelt behind Nur in reverential silence, watching him write, keeping himself apart from the others, the one true disciple in whose safe custody Nur could place his work.

Deven put up both his hands and pushed him back as far as he could on the small landing, till his back was against the wall. “I can’t do that,” he hissed, “it is the property of the college.”

[…]

Deven went down the wooden staircase as steadily as he could although his knees shook weakly. Murad’s perfidy filled him with the iron of resistance and he felt steady, straight. As he reached the foot of the stairs, he heard Murad call over the banisters, “One last time I am offering to help—one last time. Sole rights! Only sole rights!”

Deven went towards the exit without looking back.

Deven recalled, incongruously enough, the conversation in the canteen with Jayadev, how they had envied their scientist colleagues who had at their command the discipline of mathematics, of geometry, in which every question had its answer and every problem its solution. If art, if poetry, could be made to submit their answers, not merely to contain them within perfect, unblemished shapes but to release them and make them available, then—he thought, then—

But then the bubble would be breached and burst, and it would no longer be perfect. And if it were not perfect, and constant, then it would all have been for nothing, it would be nothing.

Deven did not have the courage. He did not have the time. He did not have the will or the wherewithal to deal with this new presence, one he had been happy to ignore earlier and relegate to the grotesque world of hysterics, termagants, viragos, the demented and the outcast. It was not for the timid and circumspect to enter that world on a mission of mercy or rescue. If he were to venture into it, what he learnt would destroy him as a moment of lucidity can destroy the merciful delusions of a madman. He could not allow that.

He tried to return to his old idolatry of the poet, his awe of him, his devotion when it had still been pure, and his gratitude for his poetry and friendship, that strange, unexpected, unimaginable friendship that had brought him so much pain.

That friendship still existed, even if there had been a muddle, a misunderstanding. He had imagined he was taking Nur’s poetry into safe custody, and not realized that if he was to be custodian of Nur’s genius, then Nur would become his custodian and place him in custody too. This alliance could be considered an unendurable burden—or else a shining honour. Both demanded an equal strength.

He had accepted the gift of Nur’s poetry and that meant he was custodian of Nur’s very soul and spirit. It was a great distinction. He could not deny or abandon that under any pressure.

He turned back. He walked up the path. Soon the sun would be up and blazing. The day would begin, with its calamities. They would flash out of the sky and cut him down like swords. He would run to meet them. He ran, stopping only to pull a branch of thorns from under his foot.