The title In Custody comes from the book’s closing passage. The passage begins with Deven overcome with resentment toward his former idol Nur—who has left Deven mired in debt and professionally ruined, with no meaningful work to show for it. But then, Deven realizes that he and Nur have actually made a kind of mutual exchange: he has become the “custodian of Nur’s genius,” while Nur has “place[d] him in custody too” by taking over his life. Deven spends most of the novel believing that everyone else is exploiting him for personal gain while he tries to follow his passion. But he ultimately realizes that he has also been exploiting Nur’s passion for his own personal gain. Deven’s epiphany resolves a tension that runs throughout the novel between viewing literature as art and viewing it as work—or valuing it because it’s beautiful, or because it’s useful.
This tension first comes out when Deven visits Nur and they both feel that the other isn’t taking them seriously enough. Deven wants to preserve and study Nur’s poetry, which he sees as a kind of sacred art, while Nur and his wife Imtiaz see Deven’s efforts to preserve and analyze Nur’s work as a form of defilement. For instance, Imtiaz accuses literary scholars of “feed[ing] upon [poets’] carcasses,” and Nur objects to being “bled […] to produce poetry.” To them, poetry in its truest form is a live recital that brings people together, not a bunch of words on a page. Indeed, they think it’s a waste of time and money to listen to stuffy academics who just explain the work of dead writers. Yet while Nur and Imtiaz accuse Deven of exploiting them, they also exploit him for their own benefit—and so does everyone else: Murad uses Deven to get inexpensive material for his magazine; Nur uses him to get free food and drink for himself and his friends; and Nur’s other wife, Safiya, uses him to get an envelope of cash in exchange for Nur’s time. While everyone seems to be conspiring to squeeze money out of Deven, this doesn’t mean it’s an unfair trade: as he points out in the final passage, he still gets the great privilege to preserve and transmit Nur’s legacy. In short, the novel suggests that there’s no true difference between the two viewpoints: artists are merely those who trade what is beautiful for what is useful, and seeking beauty is just a disguised form of seeking self-interest.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Beauty vs. Utility ThemeTracker
Beauty vs. Utility Quotes in In Custody
It was sadly disappointing to him that he was not travelling up to Delhi on this important occasion in a style more suited to a literary man, a literary event. He had never found a way to reconcile the meanness of his physical existence with the purity and immensity of his literary yearnings. The latter were constantly assaulted and wrecked by the former—as now in the form of the agonized dog, the jolting bus, the peanut-crunching neighbour, the little tin box in which Sarla had packed his lunch [… and] the smallness of the sum of money he carried in his pocket: all these indignities and impediments. How, out of such base material, was he to wrest a meeting with a great poet, some kind of dialogue with him, some means of ensuring that this rare opportunity would not also turn to dust, spilled blood and lament?
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!”
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?
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.
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.
“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—”
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 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.
