Free No God in Sight by Altaf Tyrewala

beauty. Today, Nawaz-saab will reveal the couplet’s meaning.
    ‘You must first get accustomed to the sound, Abhay,’ he says. ‘Urdu poetry is to be secreted like silk. Savor every strand, Abhay, savor every strand.’
    Nawaz-saab is right. When basking in the sun of Urdu poetry, there’s no use hurrying; I must let its beauty and wisdom invade me like a tan.
    I don’t know Urdu. I don’t know Urdu and I will never forgive my parents for it. Will never forgive them for such a dry, artless upbringing, devoid of culture or beauty—no music, no ideas, nothing. Money—that’s the be-all and end-all of the artistry my lineage has ever dabbled in.
    I tried explaining this to Swati. She would have none of it. ‘I’m sorry, Abhay, you’re just too crude! We have tremendous physical chemistry, agreed, but we can’t be in bed all the time. What about the mornings or during meals? What do we talk of then? How many
pro
grams you
de
bugged? I want someone immersed in life, someone who can buy me diamonds while fascinating me with his take on Pynchon’s works.’
    I heaved tragically, ‘Okay, Swati, okay. I may not have read Pynchon, but I’ll show you. When I return from India, you’ll see. I’ll be arty, just as you like. Please, will you marry me then?’
    She tightened her grip on my hair. ‘God, Abhay, if you don’t like all this stuff, it’s okay. Maybe I’m just not the one for you.’
    ‘No, Swati, no!’ I looked up from between her thighs. ‘You’re the one for me! Give me two months. When I come back to Boston, I promise I’ll be dripping with the humanities like you won’t believe.’
    Swati yielded, and I flew to India two days later for a vacation with a mission: the artification of Abhay Joshi.
    Mom and dad were confounded by my outbursts. ‘The woman I love won’t marry me because I’m a ruffian! You know how that feels, dad? DD, Hindi films, Hindi songs—that’s all you both ever gave me. I’m going to lose the woman I love because you two couldn’t care about life’s finer things!’
    As I recovered from jet lag, my befuddled begetters frantically arranged to pack in a childhood’s worth of refinement in two months. Dad visited a sitarist in Bhandup to request a crash course in the instrument. ‘How crashed a course did you have in mind?’ the sitarist asked. ‘A month and a half long,’ dad replied. The man doubled over hysterically.
    After spreading the word around, mom remained luckless. She gifted me something by Narayan and took to masterminding daily feasts.
    ‘This place is supposed to be a motherlode of culture!’ I exclaimed one night over dinner. ‘Where’s the goddamn culture? I don’t see any culture. Where’s the culture?’
    Days passed. Narayan became progressively unchallenging, and my chances with Swati lessened by the minute. ‘Maybe some other girl…?’ mom suggested and fled toescape my cold stare.
    Then a call came, in the third week, for dad. It was Firoz-saab, the sitar instructor who had laughed him out. He was sorry, and wanted to help. Dad put his hand over the phone and mimed across the room:
Would I be interested in learning Urdu poetry? Ghalib, Faiz, Sheikh?
    Would I ever!
    ‘Expect Nawaz-saab tomorrow morning,’ Firoz-saab said, ‘and please don’t offend him by haggling. For the revelation of a precious and life-altering body of Urdu poetry, three thousand rupees is surely a joke.’
    For a life with Swati, sixty dollars were truly nothing.
    When mom opened the door the next morning at ten, it was as if our epiphanies had come alive. She bowed while moving aside to let Nawaz-saab in.
    ‘Please,’ dad invited him in, ‘come. Have a seat.’
    The sherwani-clad man with fine features and a mouth red with paan looked around with the creative nervousness of an artist. On his way to the sofa, he banged his toes against the leg of a dining chair and nearly tripped over an edge of the carpet. Then he dropped the pile of books he was carrying.