Nimita's Place

by Akshita Nanda

  Nimita does not even nod. What else is there to say?

  She sees the inspector’s car leave but not his short stopover at the Bakshi bungalow. Inspector Khan has either forgotten about or discounted the late Urmila Sachdev’s rifle but he is well aware that Mohinder Bakshi came back from East Africa with more than one gun, including something that is used for hunting elephants.

  After half an hour of pleading, firm talking and near yelling, he has to leave for Model Town without getting the Bakshi’s lethal weapon in his custody.

  Mohinder Bakshi snorts as Rahmatullah Khan drives away. “All these people are alike,” he says. “Why does he want us to give up our protection in these times?”

  Pramila Bakshi is not so sure. “Two rifles are enough, surely, maybe we should have given him the elephant gun. In these times, it’s not good to be on the bad side of the police.”

  Mohinder waves his hand. “In these times I only trust myself.”

  Rahim is not yet back from the post office which is barely 15 minutes away on Mall Road. Nimita finishes her packing, curses the lack of a telephone, wishes they had gone to the bazaar and bought a radio the very week Dilip-Praji left. Maybe she should have taken Pam-Auntyji’s offer. At least the Bakshis have a radio.

  She calls Najma. “Go next door and find out if there is anything on the radio.”

  The servant nods, twisting her hands. Her husband away for almost two hours on this day. It cannot be good news. Just as Najma reaches the gate, Radheshyam and Drupal Limbu turn at the sound of running feet. Rahim, distraught, eyes streaming, is tripping over his own legs in his haste to reach home.

  “What happened?” three voices ask.

  Rahim shakes his head, puts his hands on his knees and coughs. Najma looks to the water pot near the gate guard’s seat. Radheshyam follows her eyes.

  “Here, hold out your hands,” he says roughly, and slowly pours water into Rahim’s cupped hands, careful to hold the earthen pot high up so it will not touch Muslim skin.

  When Rahim has drunk and wiped his face with his palms, he speaks. “They have set fire to Papar Mandi.”

  “Who?”

  He bursts into tears.

  Najma tugs at his sleeve. “Come tell Bibiji,” she says.

  The GPO did not open that day. There was a notice to that effect on the door, but Rahim had to wait on the steps with several others hoping to send telegrams until someone who could read turned up.

  On his way back, he noticed a lot of activity around Mayo Hospital. “What’s happening?” he asked the gate guard.

  “The doctor sahibs are getting ready.”

  “For what?”

  “Don’t you know? Early in the morning some gangs went and started a fight in Papar Mandi. Now they are burning the area.” The guard, a Hindu, spat. “I hear those people are sending back the fire brigade and any Hindus trying to escape are forced back into the flames at gunpoint.”

  Nimita listens to this, mouth open.

  “Bibiji, they say the gangs are moving out today. There is some magistrate behind them, some big name in the government, so they feel they can do anything. Bibiji, I don’t know if this place is safe.”

  Nimita can hear Rahim’s words but they do not seem to make sense.

  “Bibiji,” Najma says. “For Baby’s sake, you should go. You should all go.” She moves forward, speaking almost in Nimita’s face, a huge breach of etiquette. “Don’t wait until someone comes. This house is already marked. There is no point in you staying.”

  She turns to the mesmerised Radheshyam, to Shukla-Bibi, who has left the kitchen to stand, staring, in the living room. “You! Can’t you hear what He is saying? Get ready to go!”

  Shukla-Bibi wails, one long ululation that sets Urmila-Baby off. Radheshyam begins chanting the name of Ram. Najma claps her hands. “Ram or God, nobody will save you if you don’t save yourselves.”

  “Enough,” Nimita says, rocking Urmila-Baby to quieten her. “Shukla-Bibi, Radheshyam, we’ll all go to my parents’ house.” She looks at Najma and Rahim. “All of us.”

  The suitcase is already packed for the night but who knows how long they may have to be in Model Town? She tells Radheshyam to take out the big trunk, tells Najma to help her put Baby’s things inside. Then hesitates.

  “Shukla-Bibi, think that you will not be coming back for a few days. Take your things. Take any valuables,” she says. “Radheshyam, you also. Anything a thief might take.”

  For these are thieves coming to her house and she can’t even defend it against them. Her house, the place where she has lived for nearly three years, where her daughter sleeps, where she fixed the radio and made family out of strangers. The house she once dreaded coming to, which became her home. Now she is being forced out of it?

  She goes to Urmila-Mummyji’s room and pushes aside her mother-in-law’s saris, looking for the gun and the cartridges. She takes both and tells Radheshyam to bury them in the garden. At least the invaders won’t get any arms from them.

  What else to take? Much of the jewellery is in the bank locker but whatever there is she packs. What else? A china statue of a dancer that Karan bought because of its sweet face, which Nimita cannot bear the thought of being pawed over by robbers.

  Najma helps her close the trunk. “Now you also go and pack,” Nimita says.

  “Let’s get the trunk down,” Najma says.

  The Ford car with its precious ration of petrol has a boot too small for the trunk. The steel box has to be secured on top of the car with rope.

  Nimita gets into the car, Drupal Limbu at her side, Shukla-Bibi at the back holding Urmila-Baby, Radheshyam next to her. There are still Najma, Rahim, Shabbo and Kabir to fit in. Someone will have to sit on somebody’s lap, never mind the laws of purity and pollution.

  “Come on,” Nimita says but Najma doesn’t move.

  “Najma?”

  “Bibiji, you don’t worry about us,” she says. “They are not looking for us.”

  “Bibiji, go,” Rahim says, voice wobbling.

  Nimita gets out of the car. “And where will you go?”

  “I’ll go to maulvi sahib,” Rahim says. “I’ll take her and the children there right now. We will be all right, you just lock up the house and go.”

  “Bibiji, you’re delaying and that’s not good. Please go,” Najma says.

  Urmila-Baby cries for her mother and Nimita bangs her fist against the side of the car. She gets in, takes a long look at her servants.

  “Tell Bakshi Sahib I’ve gone to my mother’s house. We’ll be back in two to three days,” she says. “Make sure you come back in two to three days.”

  Rahim and Najma nod, their children quiet by their side.

  Nimita starts the car. Shukla-Bibi leans out of the window. “If anything goes wrong in my absence, I’ll thrash you both so hard,” she says. She is crying.

  3.

  On the open road down to Model Town is a column of dust, as might be kicked up by a gang of men on horses or tongas. “Bibiji,” Drupal Limbu says from the passenger seat.

  “I see it,” Nimita says and swerves into a side lane. She knows the route from here, a circular path that winds in between the fields. When the car and the column of dust are separated by the length of one drying acre of cropland, she breathes again.

  It takes an age to reach the Khosla bungalow and when she does, her heart fails for there are at least five cars outside it, as well as Charan-Mama’s jeep. She pulls in, throws open the driver-side door and runs up the steps of the house, leaving her servants to bring the baby.

  Her mother is standing with Charan-Mama in the hall. Sharada Khosla is eerily poised.

  “Go see him,” she says and sways, her brother reaching out to steady her.

  Nimita cannot quite understand what she already knows. She sees the silent men and women in the hall: Iqbal-Uncleji, Rahmatullah-Uncleji, Shehnaz-Auntyji, Mr and Mrs Damania, all their neighbours in Model Town. How is it that they are all here?

  S
hukla-Bibi comes in, carrying Urmila-Baby.

  “Take the child too,” Charan-Mama says and Nimita takes her daughter in her arms and walks up the steps to her parents’ room. She has done this before once but that was for Karan’s mother, a beloved, kind aunty figure for whom she shed many tears and truly believed she mourned.

  This is different.

  This before her is her childhood dead, her protector gone, the man who she once thought was taller than the sky shrunken into a white-clothed body.

  There is a handkerchief on his face. She lifts it up, but only for a second.

  Urmila-Baby is fretful in her arms. She holds the child tight and closes her eyes, unable to unsee.

  Charan-Mama must have washed and bathed the body, clothed it in white, covered the face. Charan-Mama, who picked her father out from a cricket match for his only sister, who smiled on the wedding, doted on his niece and who now will take the body of his brother-in-law for the final rites on the banks of the Ravi.

  There is a pundit waiting when Nimita comes down with Urmila-Baby. It occurs to her that he is the only other Hindu in the room, apart from the immediate family. What is to be done? Will the food for the mourning family be sent by the Qureshis, the Khans, the Damanias?

  It is this that decides Nimita as much as the news the men bring when they return from the burning ghat just before curfew. Only Charan-Mama and his Gurkhas stayed the course of the cremation. Inspector Khan was called back to duty and Mr Qureshi was no use, weeping so hard he could barely stand upright.

  The column of dust she avoided on her way here came from a Pathan gang fleeing with the loot from a Sikh bungalow in M-Block, the Anand household. Mr Anand had a rifle but shooting one man enraged his fellows, who then leapt at the Anand men with knives. It is believed that the men were taken to the hospital. What happened to their wives and children is not known.

  As Charan-Mama finished with the rites on the river bank, more bodies arrived at the ghat.

  What to do next? Nimita’s father is dead, his ashes scattered on the river Ravi. She should have gone to Hardwar to immerse him in the Ganga but Charan-Mama thought this was best. Quick. Clean.

  All there is of Prem Khosla in this house are his suits, his clothes, his wife staring at a blank wall, his daughter and granddaughter.

  All there is to eat in the house are cold parathas from the previous day, milk and fruit which the Qureshis and Khans and Damanias have sent, keeping to established custom, unsure of whether cooked food would be eaten. Nimita is glad for this thoughtfulness, but she would have killed for something hot to eat.

  Charan-Mama clears his throat. “The army is being deployed. Things are worse in Amritsar,” he says.

  He can take leave for only one more day.

  “We’ll go to Delhi,” says Nimita.

  The problem is how to get to Delhi from Lahore. There are airplane flights but tickets are expensive and with Karan and Prem Khosla gone, there is not enough ready cash in the house. Train would be the fastest, but Charan-Mama won’t put them on the train, not when the line goes through troubled spots like Amritsar and Jullunder.

  That leaves the Grand Trunk Road to Delhi, nearly five hundred kilometres of open road, a 12-hour journey with a child.

  “It’s the safest,” Charan-Mama says. “I’ll send Drupal and Deepak with you. They know the way and an army vehicle will be recognised anywhere. Just guide them once you get to Delhi.”

  Leave. Leave Model Town now. Leave her childhood home just as she left her married home and go to Delhi, a city she barely knows, to the home of a sister-in-law she barely knows to find.

  The world has gone mad. Nimita wants to lie down, close her eyes and make it all go away for a while. But here is Urmila-Baby, asleep in her lap, Mummy with eyes closed and tears down her cheeks refusing to eat. They must be protected.

  Mummy has her arms around herself and is rocking. “How can I go? How can I leave this place and go?”

  Courage, Mummy, Nimita wants to say, but how can she say that after the events of the day? She puts her arm around her mother instead and leans her head on her shoulder.

  For the rest of her life, Nimita will do her best to forget the dream-like horror of that night, worse even than the night before when she lay awake in her bedroom on Temple Road and imagined every passing breeze was an armed gang of looters at her door. This night her eyes are full of flames, thoughts of her father’s unseen pyre mixing with memories of Urmila-Mummyji’s final rites. Propping up Dilip-Praji, she and Shanti-Bhabhi had seen so many things that women were not meant to see: the breaking of the skull, the twisting of the corpse in the flames—fat and gristle leaving the body first—the terrible sweet smell that not even a pot of incense could disguise.

  At first light, Nimita is up, tending to her mother, her daughter, the servants. Kanta-Bibi and Chandu do not want to go to Delhi, though there is room in the jeep. They are sent off with wages and the sneers of Radheshyam and Shukla-Bibi, who swear eternal fidelity and help Sharada Khosla pack. Nimita does most of the work, throwing saris and petticoats and underwear into a trunk along with whatever little jewellery and money she can find.

  The journey to Delhi takes three days. It might have gone faster without a child to change and tend to, without the sudden nausea and fever that takes Sharada and forces them to stop overlong in an army cantonment near Patiala. Wherever she can, Nimita sends telegrams to Charan-Mama and Karan in Delhi, giving their relative location, lying that all is well. She knows there will be no return messages but at every rest stop she hopes for one, even when there is nothing but open road, blue sky and a wondering child in her arms pointing at the dust.

  Thin caterpillars in the distance turn into rows and rows of men, women and children up close, carrying their belongings on their heads, in bullock carts, in barrows. Many are Muslims moving west. Others are Sikh or Hindu farmers moving east towards Delhi. Often, the only difference is in their names and even those are not so different—Bhatia Muslims are Bhatti Hindus who converted two generations ago.

  In the months to come, there will be even more people on the road, villages turned into ghost towns with empty homes, burnt thatch roofs, bodies littering the soil. The mass migration will be pursued by robbers and looters eager to avenge past slights by stealing goods and most importantly women from another religion. The skies will thunder in horror at what they witness, the rivers Beas and Sutlej will overflow their banks and swallow raiders and refugees in their muddy torrents.

  Nimita escapes the worst of it, but she is living in her own private hell, defined by a dead father and a mother who appears to be giving up on life. Closer to Delhi proper, the traffic increases. Bullock carts, people on foot. Not all are refugees. Some appear to be going on other legitimate business.

  The next few hours seem to Nimita to last as long as the entire journey did. She is hot, tired, thirsty, in need of a bath and a change of clothes. She wants Urmila-Baby, darling child, to be taken off her hands, Radheshyam and Shukla-Bibi banished to servants’ quarters, Mummy to be attended to by a doctor so she, Nimita, can finally lie down and sleep properly.

  Increasingly, she wants Karan. She wants his hands brushing the dirt and tangles out of her hair, massaging her shoulders and making his child smile. But first she must find the way to Shanti-Bhabhi’s maternal home. She has the address and the name of Bhabhi’s father, but there appear to be three roads with the same name and at least three Pratik Lal Chands in the vicinity.

  After knocking on the house of a lawyer, an insurance broker and a banker, she finally arrives at the modest home of Pratik Lal Chand Publisher. The two-storey building is half the size of the Sachdev bungalow, and the neat and tidy garden is the size of the plot that Najma used to occupy at home.

  Shanti-Bhabhi herself comes to the door when the Gurkhas knock and Nimita folds out of the jeep, almost in tears, remembering in time to help Mummy out and take Urmila-Baby from Shukla-Bibi.

  “Nimita,” Shanti-Bhabhi says, in shock and
almost forgetting to brush in blessing the heads of the servants who have rushed to touch her feet, as is customary.

  “Karan is at home?” Nimita says, after touching her bhabhi’s feet. Tony-Baby runs out and is covered with kisses by Shukla-Bibi. He makes a grab for Urmila-Baby. Behind him comes a servant carrying the new child, Monty, whom Nimita has yet to see. She makes the appropriate noises, then looks up to see Shanti-Bhabhi standing with her hand on the door for support.

  “Isn’t Karan with you?” Shanti-Bhabhi says.

  “No,” says Nimita. “Karan came to Delhi to talk to Praji.”

  “Yes,” Shanti-Bhabhi says. “But then two days later we read of what had happened on Temple Road and he got on the first train back to Lahore.”

  “We came by road,” is all Nimita can say. The heat and thirst and stress are making the world spin. “We came by road, in the jeep. What happened on Temple Road?”

  4.

  For ten days, the house of Pratik Lal Chand in Delhi is a place of mourning. Dilip-Praji is prostrate with grief. The shock of Nimita’s appearance without Karan brings on an attack and days of anxious follow-up care from Shanti-Bhabhi’s doctor brother.

  Sharada Khosla too is nearly catatonic. How can she cope with reality? Husband murdered, home abandoned, her daughter possibly widowed? This must be a dream.

  Nimita too finds it hard to understand her situation, dependent now for food and shelter on the kindness of near strangers. Yes, this is Dilip-Praji’s in-laws’ place, but who are they really of Nimita’s that she dare live for days and days in their home with not only her mother and daughter but two servants who also need to be fed and cared for?

  The Gurkhas stay only one night, enough time to eat and sleep a few hours before obeying the orders in Charan-Mama’s last telegram and reporting to the Delhi Cantonment. He will arrive in a few weeks, he says, for his command is now to escort the refugees moving east from Lahore, protecting them from bandits and retaliatory attacks.