In Custody by Anita Desai — Summary & Analysis
Author: Anita Desai
Genre/Form: Novel (Indian Fiction in English)
Curriculum: BA English Honours | Semester 2 | Indian Fiction in English
Chapter-by-Chapter Summary
Chapter 1 — The Assignment
The novel opens with Deven Sharma, a lecturer of Hindi at a small college in the fictional town of Mirpur (modelled on a provincial North Indian town). Though he teaches Hindi, Deven's real passion is Urdu poetry — a love instilled in him by his father, who had died when Deven was young. Deven is a man of unfulfilled aspirations: his job is dull, his marriage to Sarla is joyless, and his domestic life is cramped and stifling.
His old friend Murad Ali runs a small, struggling Urdu literary journal from Delhi. Murad contacts Deven and asks him to travel to Delhi to interview Nur, the greatest living Urdu poet, for a special feature in the magazine. Deven idolises Nur from afar — Nur's poetry represents for him everything transcendent, beautiful, and beyond the drudgery of his daily life.
Deven is thrilled at the prospect but also terrified. He is unsure whether he is worthy of meeting Nur, and he is aware that Murad — despite the flattery — is using him because Murad himself cannot do the task.
Chapter 2 — Mirpur and the Letter
Mirpur is increasingly oppressive for Deven — a dusty, stagnant place that offers him nothing. He receives a formal letter of recommendation from Murad to present to Nur and gain access to the poet. Deven finds the whole idea of needing a formal letter to meet his idol deeply uncomfortable. He is conflicted: Should he go? Is he capable of meeting such a great man? After much internal deliberation, he finally resolves to go.
Chapter 3 — The Disillusionment Begins
Deven goes to Nur's house in Old Delhi. What he finds shatters his romantic image of the poet. Nur lives in a dilapidated, chaotic house surrounded by sycophants and hangers-on who come not for his poetry but for the food, drink, and entertainment his household provides. Nur's second wife, Imtiyaz Begum — a once-famous singer who has long outlasted her talent — dominates the household with her theatrical temperament and demands. Nur, the great poet, is reduced to a corner of his own home, ignored and bullied.
When Deven approaches Nur, the poet dismisses him irritably, telling him he is disturbing him. Nur also makes a bitter remark that Urdu as a language effectively died in 1947 and that pursuing it is pointless. Deven is deeply shocked and disheartened by the squalor and degradation surrounding the man he had imagined as a towering, noble figure.
Chapter 4 — Return and Doubt
After his first visit to Nur, Deven returns to Mirpur in a state of deep disappointment and confusion. He is angry at himself for going, and tries to reassimilate into his routine at the college. But the encounter has unsettled him. He goes home to find his son Manu, and feels even more disconnected and disenchanted. Anita Desai captures this moment precisely: Deven feels that visiting Nur was "like walking away from the bridge of Delhi" — having glimpsed something he cannot now forget.
Chapter 5 — Nur's Unexpected Letter
A letter arrives from Nur, asking Deven to become his personal secretary. This surprises Deven greatly — he had never imagined Nur would reach out. Murad intervenes and pushes Deven to accept, urging him to go back to Delhi and conduct a proper recorded interview with Nur. Murad envisions a full special issue of his journal dedicated to Nur's work. He tells Deven he could even write a book — Days with Nur Shahjahanabadi — a project that could immortalise both Nur and Deven himself.
Deven is torn. He cannot abandon his job in Mirpur — the college is his only source of income — but he cannot resist the pull of Nur's world either. Under Murad's pressure, he agrees to go back to Delhi and attempt the interview.
Chapter 6 — Preparations: The Tape Recorder
With the interview plan formalised, Deven needs a tape recorder. The head of the Urdu department at his college, Mr. Siddiqui, initially refuses to help. However, Murad takes Deven to an electronics shop where, through prior arrangement with the shopkeeper, Deven is pressured into purchasing an expensive tape recorder — not renting or borrowing one — even though Deven has limited knowledge of electronics. The shopkeeper also provides a technician, a young man called Chiku (Pintu), to assist Deven in operating the equipment during the interview.
Chapter 7 — The Interview Blocked Again
Deven returns to Delhi with the tape recorder and the technician, ready to conduct the interview. However, upon arrival he learns that Nur's second wife, Imtiyaz Begum, has fallen gravely ill following her birthday celebrations. Nur refuses to give the interview in these circumstances. The mission is blocked again. Deven is stranded, having already invested money he does not have.
Chapter 8 — The Interview at Last: Arranged and Attempted
Deven refuses to give up. With the help of Mr. Siddiqui, who uses his contacts to raise funds from the college registrar, a proper room is hired for the interview and the session is formally arranged. Deven manages the logistics — he sends his wife Sarla to her parents' home so she will not prevent him from going to Delhi, knowing she disapproves of the whole enterprise.
Deven arrives at the hired room with the tape recorder and Chiku. They wait for Nur. When Nur finally arrives, Deven is immediately confronted with new obstacles:
1. Nur does not come alone. He brings his entire entourage — a crowd of admirers, sycophants, and associates who crowd the room and create noise and distraction.
2. Nur refuses to focus. Instead of reciting and discussing his poetry, Nur speaks about food, drink, and other mundane matters. The interview drifts continuously off-topic.
3. Chiku is incompetent. The technician has no idea when to start or stop recording, resulting in a hopelessly disorganised, unusable tape.
4. Demands for food and drink. Nur asks Deven to order food and drinks for the assembled crowd, which means Deven must step outside to call Murad for emergency funds. Murad agrees reluctantly, telling Deven the costs will be deducted from whatever payment he receives for the article.
This chaotic scene repeats itself over three weeks. Occasionally Nur reads a verse or two of his poetry, but the technician misses the recording cues, and Nur's entourage drowns out the literary substance with noise and frivolity.
Near the end of the interview sessions, at the very moment when Nur is about to recite an entirely new, unpublished poem — something no one has heard — the tape recorder breaks down. Deven scrambles to write notes by hand. Nur, perhaps as a final act of generosity or jest, reaches over and offers to write it himself. But when he takes the pen, Nur realises he has forgotten how to write. The interview ends on this devastating note.
Chapters 9–11 — The Aftermath and Reckoning
The aftermath is a catalogue of humiliations and losses. The recordings Chiku made are incoherent and unusable — they barely resemble an interview. Deven realises the entire enterprise has been a financial and professional disaster.
A bill of ₹500 arrives from Nur's household for the rental of the interview room. Deven, penniless, goes to Murad to demand payment. Murad flatly refuses, insults Deven, and humiliates him. Deven has no recourse. Mr. Siddiqui, who had helped earlier, now distances himself entirely, angry that the college funds were wasted.
Deven is completely adrift. He wanders through Delhi — to the old city, past a park near a mosque — in a state of despair. Yet in this moment of complete failure, something unexpected happens: a moment of quiet self-reckoning. Deven realises that the failure is his own — not Murad's, not Nur's, not Imtiyaz Begum's, not Chiku's. He chose this. He did it out of his own romantic obsession and need to escape. No one else can be blamed.
In this moment of clarity, Nur's poetry floods back to him — lines he has known for years — and he finds in them a kind of consolation. He cannot preserve Nur's poetry for the world, but Nur's poetry has preserved something in him.
Deven returns home to Mirpur. In the final lines of the novel, he looks at his wife Sarla — whom he has always viewed as a burden — with a new tenderness and compassion. He sees her clearly for the first time.
Themes & Analysis
1. The Decline of Urdu and Cultural Custodianship
The novel's central preoccupation is the fate of Urdu after Partition. Nur himself declares that Urdu "died in 1947." Once the language of a shared North Indian culture — of Mughal courts, of Hindu-Muslim literary exchange — Urdu has become orphaned in independent India, associated with Pakistan, taught in dwindling departments, published in struggling journals. Deven's project of recording Nur is explicitly an act of custodianship: preserving the last voice of a dying tradition. The failure of the project — the broken tape recorder, the incompetent technician, the noisy entourage — becomes a metaphor for the impossibility of preserving what is already dying.
2. Disillusionment and the Gap Between Ideal and Reality
Deven's relationship with Nur is built entirely on romantic idealisation. He loves Nur's poetry; he projects onto the poet an image of transcendence and nobility. The actual Nur — querulous, degraded, dominated by his wife, surrounded by parasites — could not be further from this ideal. Desai traces Deven's disillusionment with clinical precision, showing how the encounter between the ideal (poetry, beauty, art) and the real (poverty, domesticity, human weakness) is always, inevitably, painful.
3. Entrapment and the Desire for Escape
Both Deven and Nur are men trapped by their circumstances. Deven is trapped in a loveless marriage, a provincial job, and a life far smaller than his inner world. Nur is trapped by his second wife, his dependents, and his own poetic fame which draws leeches rather than genuine admirers. Both men's attempts to escape — Deven through the interview project, Nur through his poetry — are shown to be partial and ultimately futile. Desai links their imprisonment thematically to suggest that all human beings are, in some sense, in custody.
4. Masculinity, Marriage, and Domestic Life
Deven's relationship with Sarla, his wife, is a sustained portrait of marital estrangement. He sees her as an obstacle, an embodiment of the dull domestic life he is trying to transcend. Yet at the end of the novel, Deven's moment of maturity is signalled precisely by his ability to see Sarla with compassion — to recognise her as a person rather than a prison. Similarly, Nur's domestic life with Imtiyaz Begum illustrates the destruction that bad marriages can wreak on creative lives.
5. Failure as Self-Knowledge
In many novels, failure is merely a plot device. In In Custody, failure is the novel's subject and its destination. Deven's final recognition — that the failed interview was his own folly, undertaken out of his own need — constitutes a moment of genuine self-knowledge. The novel does not offer triumph or redemption in the conventional sense; instead, it suggests that understanding one's own complicity in one's failure is itself a kind of maturity.
6. Language and Identity in Post-Partition India
Deven teaches Hindi but loves Urdu — a split that reflects a broader cultural and national fracture. The novel raises the question of who owns literary traditions after Partition, and what happens to language when it is stripped of its political and cultural home. Urdu in the novel is not just a language but an entire world of feeling and beauty, now in terminal decline.
Literary Devices / Key Terminology
Important Quotes
> "Urdu died in 1947." — Nur to Deven
This is Nur's bitter declaration about Partition's cultural consequences. It sets the elegiac tone of the entire novel and foregrounds the theme of linguistic and cultural death.
> "It was as effective as walking away from the bridge of Delhi after his visit to Nur — he felt the interview living at all, behind, and left him bare."
This line (paraphrased from Anita Desai's prose) captures the hollow feeling Deven is left with after his first encounter with Nur — the gap between what he had hoped for and what he found.
> "Days with Nur Shahjahanabadi" — the title Murad proposes for Deven's would-be book
This never-written book title is a cruelly ironic emblem of Deven's failed ambition. The grandeur of the proposed title contrasts with the chaos and humiliation of the actual days spent with Nur.